Portrait
Keith Haring
Born
4 May 1958Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
Died
16 February 1990New York City, USA · aged 31
ArtistUnited States

Keith Haring

His chalk drawings in the New York subway became a worldwide visual language – and a weapon in the fight against AIDS.

Keith Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and drew cartoons with his father as a child. In 1978 he moved to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts and found a home in the city’s gay scene and the clubs of the downtown art world.

From 1980 he drew with white chalk on the empty black advertising panels in subway stations: crawling babies, barking dogs, dancing figures, flying saucers. He made thousands of these drawings and was arrested several times for them. His simple, bold lines soon appeared in galleries, on murals around the world and on T-shirts in his own “Pop Shop”.

Haring was openly gay, and his art was political: against apartheid, against the crack epidemic, for safe sex. In 1988 he learned that he had AIDS. He spoke openly about it, made posters for the activist group ACT UP, such as “Ignorance = Fear”, and in 1989 founded the Keith Haring Foundation to support children’s programmes and AIDS organisations.

He died in New York in 1990, aged 31. His foundation continues his work.

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