“Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something I think about the person who made it.” Journal entry by Keith Haring July 15, 1986.
The retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a dizzying and vast exhibit, comprising nine rooms of monumental works, the extant subway drawings, video creations by and television spots on Haring and journal entries, drawings, photos, and scrapbooks dating to his pre-teen years. Nonetheless it is made comprehensible by the emphasis on Keith Haring’s warmth and humanity. Rather than critique the work of the best-known artist of the 1980s and one of the most accessible fine artists ever, I spoke to Keith’s parents; a sister; his boyhood friend, Kermit Oswald; his high school art teacher and the founder of the New Arts program to get a sense of who he was.
The debate over how the intent of the artist, the perception of the viewer and the metaphysical reality of an object converge to create the quirky phenomenon of art will never end. But Keith Haring and his art seem particularly well suited to a discussion of the artist as a person versus what he intended and what he made.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring grew up in the small town of Kutztown, Pennsylvania (population 3,500 when students from Kutztown University go home.) Educated in the public schools, Keith then took printmaking courses for two years at the University of Pittsburgh and at Oswald’s urging, moved to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts.
From brightly colored, faceless, dancing figures on tee shirts and posters to huge interlocking grids of shapes to searing indictments of Christian hypocrisy, the images that Keith Haring produced were seen around the world. But the people who knew him and shaped him in Kutztown, Pennsylvania distance themselves from his prominence in and influence by the New York art world and night life and from his homosexuality, emphasizing instead the happy pictures he created and the friendly, approachable person he remained until his death from AIDS-related causes. At the same time, family members and teachers say that the origins of Keith’s style and talent were apparent in his childhood experiences and creations.
How did Keith’s small-town upbringing produce the bold subway graffiti artist who transformed the face of American pop art with a powerful lexicon of whimsically simple, blatantly sexual, and angrily satirical symbols? It began with a childish pastime and was energized by Keith’s not quite belonging to the world in which he grew up. Keith’s father, Allen Haring, and several of Allen’s seven brothers enjoyed cartooning and doodling and drew characters for Keith and other children of the family. Karen, one of three younger sisters says, “I liked a lot of his things. He used to do things that would fill in a space with teeny, tiny shapes, no characters. I remember he had taken a photograph of himself on special paper you could draw on and then did watercolor on top of it. I always liked that cartoon type stuff with people and animals. That photo was done when he had long hair in 1976, so it was his senior year in high school.” Oswald explains Keith’s sense of alienation, “He was the only son, the eldest and a little revolutionary. He is the only person I know who ran away from home more than once. There was something inside of him that made him do crazy things. He was always searching for something, not just something concerning his sexuality. He would run to the shore every summer to search inside himself. I think his sisters and his parents have a starry-eyed view of him.”
Keith’s high school years unmistakably revealed his talents to Nita Dietrich, who taught art in the Kutztown school district for 33 years and whom had Keith as a student for all four years of high school. She says, “I gave my students free reign. I led them in the right direction but then it was up to them. His style evolved even before he came to me. I saw it in his junior high work. Line was always predominant. He would bring things to the Kutztown Fair and there you could also see this inclination to work with line. He was not interested in ceramics or jewelry, but he did batik and that was a natural outlet for his line schemes. I do have a prize possession, a batik he did in his senior year, which hung over my storage room window (in the classroom) and which I took home with me when I retired.”
Mark-making extended beyond the classroom. Dietrich adds, “Keith was my paper boy too, and lived only a block from where I live. Two blocks of cement were replaced on my side of the street, and he scratched his initials in the wet cement. It still says, ‘K.H.’”
Kermit Oswald, himself an accomplished jewelry designer and successful businessman and Keith’s friend from first grade on, says that Keith’s work was first and foremost a “dialogue with the front page [of the newspapers.]” He continues, “He was responding to the media almost every day of his life. He was usually outraged by the news of the day and responded to it in the studio. That was the wonderful thing about his work. When England invaded the Falklands, Keith drew an octopus person which represented imperialist England.” The retrospective includes part of the series of absurdist collages of headlines from the New York Post. One of the most famous reads, “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop; Pope Marries.” However, the dialogue with pop culture began even earlier. A wistful poem he wrote during his prepubescent years to an anonymous “you” appropriates a line from a Carol King song.
In a journal entry from February 1987, Keith himself wrote, “It’s about understanding not only the work, but the world we live in and the times we live in and being a kind of mirror on that. I think it happens really naturally and inevitably if you are honest with yourself and your times.”
Like his interest in popular culture, Keith’s integration of text and pictures began at an early age. Allen Haring says, “We played the pass-along game where you draw something and then the next person adds to it. I guess some people draw write stories that way too.” The retrospective shows the growing vocabulary of characters and symbols that eventually coalesced into non-verbal narratives; it begins with an exercise done at age 10 where Keith wrote descriptive words about the entities in a drawing – a dog, a boy, a horse, and a fence and leads up to the fantastical animation where beings metamorphose into other beings, and dogs jump through holes in people.
 | Oswald explains, “The lexicon of images was a parade. Not to oversimplify, but the baby, the dog, and each and every character was released much like a fashion designer releases his fall collection. The early drawings had people and dogs, and then a snake and then the Batman character with wings and then the angel. And at the time when each entered the drawing, there was all this stuff going on in the real world and in the media. It was a suspenseful process, which kept people on the edge of their seats. The zig zag man is my portrait. That’s Kermit. It’s my Warholian 15 minutes of fame. And to walk in there and see these things up on the wall brings me to my knees. We spent hours in the museums from our teenage years on and I never dreamed I would be on those walls.” |
The realization of Keith’s fame was and still is a strange thing for Keith’s family and friends, and it seems, for himself. He remained open and generous to the end. James Carroll, director of the New Arts Program in Kutztown, says that the graphic accessibility of Haring’s work was also true of his personality. “The thing that is interesting is that most every time he came to Kutztown, he spent some time at the elementary schools. He was one of the most accessible artists and if you called him on the phone, he would pick up the phone up right up until the last that he was alive. A Japanese art dealer wanted to meet Keith and wanted me to introduce her and I said, ‘You don’t need me to. You can just call him up.’ And Keith even said, ‘Why doesn’t she just call me?’ He was accessible not only to young people but to all people.”
Keith’s mother, Joan Haring, says, “Keith was so down to earth, never snooty. I don’t think of him as a famous person; I think of him as our son. He never had airs. He thought art should be shared among everyone and he instilled that in others. We give still give away his buttons and tee shirts and if school children call for information, we load them up with magazines and books – if someone is sincerely interested in his work.”
The emphasis of the Whitney curators is on the art more than the man. “Keith Haring is the most universally recognized artist of the 1980s, but this popular status has tended to overwhelm his stature as an artist,” says David A. Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “This retrospective attempts to refocus the critical perspective on Haring’s work, while broadening understanding of the phenomenon that is Keith Haring.”
Oswald disagrees, in part, with the presentation of Keith’s work as fine art held separate from pop images and everyday objects. “It would have been too ballsy of a move for the museum, he says, “but I would have shown more of the commercial things that he gave to the public. Between the larger paintings and the later works, in the room with the monkey-puzzle and the Warhol Foundation elephant, I would have placed the Swatches and the $20 tee shirts. I would have shown the other things he was making at that time. I would have placed tee shirts between the $15,000 paintings or at least the originals from which the tee shirts were done. There were beautiful drawings that were the originals; no one sees them, but they were beautiful.”
“One of his great efforts was to make his work accessible to people who normally didn’t have access to art, and it would validate all of that commercial work by placing it in museum context. He was working to knock down those barriers between expensive art and commonplace objects. That’s an important political point. He didn’t just get successful from what was shown in galleries. Everybody on every continent has seen his tee shirts.” To this, Carroll adds an insight, “Academic training was not a big part of Keith’s work. It was about resolving his own questions, which is what art should be anyway.”
Another reason to focus on the person who made these works is the curious contrast between the sweetness of some his images and the depravity of others. A ten-year-old child, my daughter, was the perfect companion with whom to see the retrospective because she saw to the core of the issues that Keith depicted. A boldly lettered poster in the first room of the exhibit says, “Everyone knows where meat comes from. It comes from the store.” Her comment on this was, “That’s about how people lie to themselves—that animals didn’t used to be alive.” About the brutal satire of fundamentalists and televangelists—portrayed by a massive untitled acrylic and oil painting from 1985 showing a tentacled monster emblazoned with a crucifix and spearing a man through his brain, taking his money, and cutting off his penis – she commented, “I guess he doesn’t like Christianity very well.” She found the babies and other simple drawings “cute” and asked rhetorically about another painting, “Is that a man putting his penis in a dog? Gross!”
Again, the people who knew Keith the longest provide valuable insights into these contrasts. Oswald says, “We were gypsies, always moving. I tried to drop Keith’s name to get a studio and the woman wouldn’t sublet the house because of those dogs in the subway. She looked at me and said, “You are friends with that guy who draws pictures of people fucking dogs?’”
Oswald adds, “He was a prophet more than a genius and he had this really beautiful way of cutting through the bullshit. There was nothing phony about him. He could cut through things and produce an image and a certain kind of truth. When looking at that dog and that penis, I ask, ‘Did he do that? Did he see that? Or did he think that?’ “Yes” to all three. You are seeing the past and the future, and you are seeing the character and you are you the character – experiencing the sight, experience and thought all at once.”
Keith’s later works shocked his parents, who never discussed his homosexuality and to whom Oswald had to break the news that Keith had AIDS. Asked if there was anything in Keith’s work that surprised them, his parents laughed nervously. His father responded, “There were some rather risqué drawings. Sometimes before taking us to an exhibit he would warn his mother,” says Allen Haring, “‘Mom, this one has some penises in it.’”
Nevertheless, from the point of view of his family, his goodness and compassion shone through. From the time he moved to New York in 1978, he was concerned with and worked toward causes, including literacy, nuclear disarmament, and AIDS education, even before he was diagnosed with AIDS. His sister, Karen, says, “My son was only a year old when Keith died in 1990. My sister, Kay’s children are older, so they do remember him, but there is a mythology of Keith. Even my daughter who is five has grown up seeing his work, not just in our house, but on tee shirts and posters and Sesame Street. She says, ‘Hey, Uncle Keith made that.’ And even my son recognizes his work, although he never knew him. They have watched some of the interviews on tape and they know he is a famous artist and as far as I know they know he was a really good person, that he liked kids. When we go to art shows and tributes, they get the sense that he did lots of great things for people. I think he was able to pass on his generosity and his ability to enjoy life as much as he could. My daughter went with us to the children’s village in New York, where they dedicated a wing to him and transferred a mural of his. The kids could say, ‘Yes Keith was a part of places like this and could feel that they know him. And the AIDS awareness gets passed along as well. They know what he died of, and we talk about that too.”
Of his being gay, Karen says, “It was just another aspect of Keith and whatever he did was okay with us because we loved him. My parents were worried about what everybody else was going to think because coming from a small town you wonder what the gossip will be. To this, Carroll adds, “I remember when he died in February 1990. I talked about Keith being a genius in an article in the Morning Call and I got a phone call from someone who was upset that I called him a genius because he was gay. You know, there are a few people who want to run our society. The Christian Coalition wants everyone else to assume their dictates. I was very taken back by that that – their assertion that I shouldn’t have praised him; you have to give praise where praise is due. You take a call like that as a prank, but it wasn’t a prank. It was strange…” And his voice trails off.
Asked what her favorite work of Keith’s is, his mother, Joan Haring says she likes the mother and baby. “I also like the things he does with angels and the ones that look happy or tend to be children’s things or the things that look like animals.” His father says, “I like the crawling baby and the dog. I do not care for morbid drawings. I know he was expressing dissatisfaction with things that weren’t right in this world. To go to show and see those is one thing, but I wouldn’t want them in my house.”
| The retrospective culminates with what I call the Keith Haring dance party, a room in which a Grace Jones video produced by Keith plays on a continuous loop, the colors and wild objects reach a crescendo and the music blares. One must experience this in the moment and that moment is the best point from which to contemplate the artist, who he was and what he meant to do. |  |
 | But this is where Oswald feels the exhibit falls short. There are images of Keith Haring, his boyish, quizzical face looking out from the walls, but Oswald says, “I think I liked the exhibit very much. There are a lot of different emotions for me in a lot of different ways. I think the museum did a really good job of pulling together the important works. It’s difficult for someone like me who knows too many things. There are pieces and periods that are missing or are not represented. It’s difficult to find out where some of Keith’s things are. Also, it’s the job of an artist to be dissatisfied with just about everything. |
The show will be very exciting to people who don’t have the knowledge of the work that I have. Still, I felt tremendous emotions see it all again. I was in tears right off the elevator. Everything that was there I have seen at one time or another. There are 50 or 60 drawings that I framed, and I get a kick out of seeing where they end up. Framing these pieces of paper gives them a life of their own and it allows them to go places. For me, one thing that was missing was Keith’s self-portraits. He did some great self-portraits. We happen to own one that he painted in 1985 – a great example of him. There was no image in the show that was him and most of his work is faceless, but the portraits are not. That is my one criticism.”
Adrienne Redd is a native of the Lehigh Valley 30 miles east of Haring’s hometown. She was a freelance writer when this review and profile were written, and hosted and produced a monthly profile show, Art Beat, on Suburban Community Television and WYBE.
She is now part of the urban agriculture program and director of online & individualized learning at www.WyncoteAcademy.org and also teaches sociology and anthropology at the Community College of Philadelphia, as well as coordinating progressive electoral campaigns and training first-time candidates, women and people of color to run for office, with an emphasize on candidates with pro-social justice, pro-cannabis, anti-mass incarceration and environmental platforms.
One and Many 
Posted on March 5, 2023
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