GLR January-February 2025

tion. The work can still disturb and provoke. The massive painting Michael Stewart—USA for Africa links graffiti artist Stewart’s brutal death at the hands of the New York City Tran sit Police to the ongoing destruction of human life in mid 1980s Africa. Numerous figures cover their faces, refusing to look either at Stewart’s strangulation—foreshadowing more recent deaths, from Eric Garner to George Floyd—or the river of blood gushing from a severed globe. Anyone believing Har ing’s art to be “lightweight” has not delved deeply enough. To make good on his “art is for everybody” dictum, Har ing made a concerted effort to bring his work to audiences of children. This forms the main focus of the Stanley Museum’s show To My Friends at Horn: Keith Haring and Iowa City . In 1984, Haring traveled to Iowa City at the invitation of Colleen Ernst, a teacher at Ernest Horn Elementary School who had introduced his art to her “fascinated” fifth- and sixth-grade stu dents. While much of Haring’s three-day visit was geared to adults, completing a large painting at the Old Capitol build

ing and lecturing at the Stanley, he also gave workshops to the schoolchildren. This led to a return invitation in 1989, less than a year before Haring’s death from AIDS, where he gave a one day painting demonstration to the children, incorporating their ideas extemporaneously into the mural A Book Full of Fun in the school library. Both paintings are included in the Stanley exhibit. In the 1984 work created at the Old Capitol, headless human figures ride a centipede, its own head replaced by a computer monitor whose screen is filled by a massive dollar sign. On one edge, a man attempts to run away, but is about to be trampled by the monstrous insect. This commentary fits into a larger anti-ma terialist motif within Haring’s art, but it doesn’t touch on sex or race in a way that might have made an artist invited to an ele mentary school persona non grata. Letters from Haring sur rounding his 1989 visit show that he was sensitized to his position as a gay man and a person with AIDS coming to work with children, knowing that parents aware of either of these sta tuses could be hostile. Being an art ambassador required code switching. To My Friends at Horn includes Haring’s AIDS poster I GNORANCE =F EAR , S ILENCE =D EATH , also from 1989, alongside A Book Full of Fun ’s colorful cartoons of scattered letters and numbers, dancing animals, and tumbling humans. (Five days after Haring completed this mural, to the evident delight of the schoolchildren, he put the finishing touches on Once Upon a Time… , his sexually explicit mural in the men’s bathroom of the Lesbian & Gay Community Center in New York City.)

Mary Jo and Sappho Female Companions of Sappho , Antoine-Christian Zacharie called Tony Zac, ca . 1868

Her face is facing the sea, her shoulders are covered in a wrap she took from a hook on the door before we walked out of the dim-lit room where I’d kissed her and called her my altar. She said: “Some say this, some say that, but I say—whatever you desire, that is beauty.” She ofc said more than that but that’s what I remember best. When we made our way along the path at the top of the precipice and saw the boys waving up to us, we called down, “Can’t you tell we’re together?” By which we meant that we liked one another and what we did better. We were otherwise behaved—tempting the fates and painting the dawn electric red with ultra-golden highlights. “So pretty,” Aphrodite said. After that, everyone wanted one. I loved her terribly. She loved me for all of a second before running off with the ghost of a goddess who’d lied when she said she loved her. She preferred that once-was to me, a mortal who never lied but who was flawed in every other way. This account of the action, recounted ad infinitum, is a way of refreshing the narrator so the story can maintain itself until the dead understand the damage they’ve done.

A MYSTERY WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

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Presbyterian minister Dan Randolph and his violin-making husband Greg Zhu travel to Los Angeles for an international violin makers' competition. While there, the world-famous Jackson Stradivarius violin is stolen - and Greg is one of only six people who knew it was even there. While trying to help clear Greg of the theft, the two of them help the authorities as they try to solve the mystery, safely recover the violin, and return it to its rightful owner before it can disappear on the arts and antiquities black market. butlerbooks.com/plausible-deception.html

M ARY J O B ANG

January–February 2025

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