Remembering Legendary Artist Keith Haring

“Keith Haring, Artist, Dies at 31; Career Began in Subway Graffiti” declared The New York Times in 1990. The headline underplayed the tremendous influence that the boyishly bespectacled Pennsylvania-born gay artist had had on New York City—and the world—in his brief life. In one decade, the 1980s, his distinctive babies, angels, barking dogs and half-human/half-beast figures, as playful and childlike as they were subversive and sophisticated, all drawn with the thick black line that was inimitably his, had gone from empty ad boards on the walls of New York City’s subway stations to the galleries and walls of the world. “I don’t like to sound pretentious,” Haring said in his last interview, two weeks before he died, “but I think that in a way, some people [in the art world establishment] were insulted because I didn’t need them…. I didn’t go through any of the proper channels and succeeded in going directly to the public and finding my own audience.” Keith HaringCourtesy of Keith Haring Foundation And it was true. The career that garnered the artist global fame and fortune had begun on the streets of New York, among a community of graffiti artists. If the art world was marked...