Photo by Walker Art Center/Kameron Herndon
Last summer, beneath a bridge that carries bikers from West Maka Ska into Uptown, an anonymous graffiti artist painted, and later repainted, a cartoon dog: Goofy-like snoot, goggly eyes, Huckleberry Hound smile. It kept getting scrubbed or painted over—but there it was again, with a heart or a hat or a cigarette. Versions still appear near overpasses, on old buildings. Some on Reddit hate seeing it. Everyone can draw a cartoon dog, but this one comes together in the decisive squiggles of a skilled artist. Without re-dos, swiped on public property before the cops come, mingling the playful and the cynical, it’s vandalism as whimsy.
That whimsy seems, per the nature of graffiti, confined to the hyperlocal, destined for the ephemeral, and cut off from grand-scale ambition. But it earned the distinction of a career arc in the life of Keith Haring. A traveling exhibit, whose last stop is Minneapolis, traces that arc at the Walker Art Center, now through Sept. 8.
The retrospective captures the New York artist’s brief yet crater-deep career. If you don’t know Keith Haring’s name, you know his work. His aesthetic helped define the 1980s, at least in retrospect. It was primary-colored and zany, simple yet jam-packed to back-of-the-cereal-box levels of complexity, with cartoon characters posed—limbs akimbo, a la puzzle pieces—like break-dancers of the city’s hip-hop scene. A student of commercial art in Pittsburgh who moved to New York City to paint at the School of Visual Arts, Haring found his artistic calling in the subways. There, in chalk, he drew insurgent scenes of folks and fauna on the black paper that covered unpurchased ad spaces.
“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” plays out, chronologically, a magnificent “What if…?” story: What if an artist—in this case, inspired by his father’s amateur cartoons, schooled in the arts, and moved by graffiti—discovered an underground outlet for his doodles? It would have been a labyrinthine, close-quartered place filled every day with the masses and patrolled by authority figures cracking down on his obscurely prophetic, technically illegal scrawlings: ziggurats, TVs, aliens, angels. Over time, that exposure pushed Haring as far above ground as any can go: into the upper echelons of mainstream culture.
Photo by Darin Kamnetz
The exhibit practically zips by. It goes from subway arrests to market viability and celebrity stardom in no time.
In the first half of the ’80s, artist Tseng Kwong Chi, a friend of Haring’s, photographed the subway work. Haring wanted “ordinary people” to see his stuff—no hidden meanings, no gated access—and there’s something gloriously unpretentious and almost incidentally meaningful about this section.
From there, a 1982 solo show made him a breakout success. The vibe, in a SoHo gallery, was DIY: He had cobbled sculptures from found objects; he had painted on hardware store tarps in lieu of canvas. One piece sold for $15,000, and he earned a quarter million in the show’s first few days. As seen in the CBS news segment that reported these figures, the people wanted an in with this cool new artist.
Photo by Walker Art Center
The Walker exhibit includes pieces from that show. There’s a re-creation of the eye-searing candy stripes that covered the walls in the gallery’s ultraviolet-lit basement, where his Day-Glo paintings popped. Haring remarked, with apparent pride, on the show’s commingling of scenes: club with graffiti with (less confidently for Haring) fine art.
Two years after that, his story overlapped with Minneapolis. He came for a residency at the Walker. Video captures Haring painting a mural at the museum, which connected to the Guthrie Theater at the time. It was vaguely radical: A dollar sign floats above a figure who stumbles forward, perhaps beset by a chimeric curse, head transforming into a sphinxlike grub whose own head is a computer. An article penned by a Minnesota teacher, whose students worked with Haring that year, addressed parents’ likely concern over the intentions of this New York artist leading fifth and sixth graders as part of his residency: “Who is Keith Haring and why is he teaching my kids graffiti?” (That spirit is still with us—check out Juxtaposition Arts’ aerosol painting classes in north Minneapolis.)
Photo by Walker Art Center/Kameron Herndon
For as kid-friendly as Haring could seem, he was bold and political. Sexuality was a “driving force” for the artist, who came out as gay upon moving to New York in 1978. His work often traded in phallic symbols—or, more accurately, in literal phalluses. The exhibit features a 14-foot canvas penis, for instance, covered in apocalyptic iterations of his cartoons, intended to indict the “phallocentric world of injustice.” Titled “The Great White Way,” to pun on Broadway’s nickname, the 1988 piece works the way Haring worked: with broad applicability—about sexuality, masculinity, capitalism, religion, and racism. As dense as a shard of hieroglyphics, it can be understood by anyone.
Elsewhere, videos of Madonna and Grace Jones insinuate pop provocation among Haring’s signature lines. In grainy footage of a Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company performance, Haring guides his brush in long ribbons, materializing kooky, penile beasts on a blank wall as part of a melange of dance, art-rock music, and androgynous costuming.
The exhibit briefly stops at Haring’s mentorship under Andy Warhol, who encouraged him to embrace commercial success. One painting casts Warhol as Mickey Mouse, a quaint idea by today’s standards. Another mourns Haring’s friendship and rivalry with Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicting a pile of the late Basquiat’s trademark crowns.
Photo by Walker Art Center
Do these collaborations count as ’80s touchstones? Here, they seem, movingly, more like steppingstones that led just so far. They remind museumgoers that Haring—who thrilled at how much he achieved in 10 years and wondered at the prospect of another five decades—died in 1990, at age 31, of AIDS-related complications.
Eventually, the show gets to the Pop Shop. Collectors had begun to cut out and sell his subway drawings. So, in 1985, he stopped. He “wanted to continue the same sort of communication,” he said, according to text at the Walker, and to still “attract the same wide range of people.” So, the Pop Shop sold mass-produced works in SoHo.
It failed to make Haring any profit, the Walker notes. This softens the fact that the artist’s turn as shopkeeper disappointed critics, who “bristled at his embrace of commerce”—a critique which may sound old-fashioned, given how perfectly purchasable the buttons and patches on display look (and how tempting the Walker’s gift shop may appear).
But there was real dissonance here. Haring’s work peddled anti-capitalist imagery. (See: one largescale 1984 painting wherein a pig monster vomits a torrential catalogue of bile-coated consumer goods.) And he exemplified that value. On a subway platform in the early ’80s, your eyes may have lit upon one of his “radiant babies” while skimming a map of the Bronx. It was an efficient sort of graffiti tag: an exploratory infant, emitting rays as though sacred. Fortuitous and free, his work in the subways may have been his best.
The exhibit ends with monumentally sized pieces that achieve something particular to that early whimsy: the ability to communicate life’s heaviness with the light touch of its brevity.
Using acrylic on canvas in 1988, Haring created what looks like a huge version of one of those chalk doodles. This one shows a wiggling, sperm-like devil bursting from an enormous egg, to which one of Haring’s figures is haplessly tied. “The imagery powerfully evokes fears about sex and the body in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that took the lives of so many within Haring’s community, including his own,” the Walker notes. At the same time, it retains something defiantly childlike.
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