GLR January-February 2025

Keith Haring’s Midwestern Moment

I S ANY OTHER ARTIST simultane ously as well-known and as little un derstood by the general public as Keith Haring? Viewed out of context, the simplicity of his iconic characters—the crawling baby, the barking dog, the stripped-down and gyrating human form— makes them easily digestible, even to non art lovers. Through the work of the Keith Haring Foundation, they are also ubiqui tous in marketing, from T-shirts to brand ing for organizations like Best Buddies International. The small-town boy from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, certainly did make it big. this past summer in stellar Midwestern museums—the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art—help blunt this critique. In tandem, they deepen and reinforce an understanding of Haring’s role as an art populist, while also highlighting the ferocity of his po litical messaging. Haring’s populism, his desire to bring art to the masses, serves as the most prominent theme in both shows. This is captured most succinctly in the title of the show Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody (which traveled from Los An geles and Toronto to arrive in Min neapolis, and features an expansive catalogue). The statement in the title is drawn from a journal entry early in Har ing’s career, where he also declared: “The public has a right to art.” The show promotes Haring’s commitment to this ideal in an early room featuring life sized, multi-screen slideshows of Haring creating his famed chalk drawings in the

A cynic might say that all this was spurred by Haring’s desire for greater fame, an argument perhaps buoyed by the opening of the Pop Shop in 1986, where the artist’s icons were affixed to every imaginable piece of merch. Indeed, the cu rators miss an opportunity to discuss more fully the tension between marketability and messaging in Haring’s art, beginning with how, in the wake of his death from AIDS in 1990, Haring’s social and politi cal messages have often been sidestepped in favor of more commercial uses of his images. Fortunately, the exhibit gives great em

P HILIP C LARK

KEITH HARING Art Is for Everybody Walker Art Center, Minneapolis April 27–September 8, 2024 TO MY FRIENDS AT HORN Keith Haring and Iowa City Stanley Museum of Art, The University of Iowa May 4, 2024–January 27, 2025

phasis to Haring’s political consciousness and its role in his art. Even before Ronald Reagan contributed, through his si lence, to the decimation of the gay community by AIDS, Har ing saw the danger in his administration’s right-wing reactionism. Using a series of cut-up newspaper headlines in 1980, Haring collaged messages like “Reagan: Ready to Kill”

This leads, however, to the main criticism lobbed at Har ing’s work: artwork that’s this popular cannot be “great” art. As a friend of mine told me when reading Brad Gooch’s re cent biography of Haring, he has always seen Haring as “lightweight” and “a Johnny One Note—same palette and im ages again and again.” Fortunately, two exhibits appearing

Keith Haring. Michael Stewart—USA for Africa , 1985.

(juxtaposing a headshot of the president and a photo of a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard burning a cross) or “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop.” Haring’s desire for his art to contribute to social change is everywhere in evidence, from anti-drug messages, such as the famous “ CRACK IS WACK ” mural along a New York City highway, to safe-sex flyers, from anti-apartheid posters like 1985’s Free South Africa series to numerous works warn ing against nuclear proliferation and environmental degrada

New York City subways of the early 1980s. Numerous works, from posters to videos to photographs of Haring’s many site specific murals, demonstrate their origin in his desire to bring art out of its predictable gallery setting and into spaces where the public would be more likely to experience it. Philip Clark, who lives near Washington D.C., is completing a biog raphy of the gay publisher H. Lynn Womack .

TheG & LR

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