‘Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody’

“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” exhibit at Walker Art CenterPhoto 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....