Little-known mural Keith Haring made for an Iowa school goes on public view for first time

Keith Haring may have painted the brightly coloured mural in an Iowa City primary school’s library in a single day, but it was the culmination of years of correspondence with its students. He first visited Ernest Horn Elementary School in 1984, during a residency organised with the University of Iowa after an art teacher at Horn, Colleen Ernst, started a pen-pal exchange. Their letter-writing continued in the following years, even as Haring’s fame grew; the students sent him a VHS of themselves singing Happy Birthday, which Haring said was a favourite gift. When he returned on 22 May 1989, Haring created the mural as a gift to the school, improvising—with input from the students—an illustrated thought bubble emerging from a book. He started with an array of shapes, lines and letters that he then transformed, such as a bent blob of turquoise becoming the rubber ring around an elephant falling from a surfboard between the letters “E” and “F”. An orange triangle became the bill of a duck, and a red circle served as the nose of a clown who is waving a flag with the image of a horn. This pictograph for “horn” is used again in Haring’s inscription...