Keith Was Here
A Signature 'Radiant Baby' from the Artist's Childhood Home
t-shirts, photographed by Robin Holland
When Keith Haring graduated from high school in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, he was swift to leave the small town and launch his meteoric ascent to becoming a beloved legend of both Pop art and progressive social activism. The artist, however, remained close with his family and would return to visit them with some frequency – and during one of these visits, Haring drew a small Radiant Baby with a gold marker on the blue wall of his childhood bedroom, just above the light switch.
“The piece is amazing because it’s on the wall of [Haring’s] bedroom where he grew up,” says art historian Christine Isabelle Oaklander, “It’s really a tag [saying] that this is Keith Haring’s room…There’s literally nothing else like this.”
The current owners of the Victorian home where Haring grew up are Angela and Scott Garner, a couple who purchased the property in 2004. The Garners recall that the seller was considering painting over the five-inch drawing. For their part, they cherished this trace of the artist and, after preserving and living with the drawing for nearly two decades, allowed the portion of the wall that includes the drawing to be extracted in hopes that it might be preserved as an intimate part of Haring's legacy.
Along with the barking dog and dancing man, the "radiant baby" is one of beloved icon Keith Haring's most recognizable motifs. Identified as the tag most closely associated with the artist himself, it's generally considered to represent youthful innocence, purity, goodness, and potential. As Tate curator Darren Pih put it, "I think there was something about the idea of a radiant baby...I think there's something very optimistic about it. He wasn't criticising his time, he was trying to cut through it and just point to something more pure, I think."
Art is for everybody.
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania. From a young age he enjoyed drawing, especially Disney characters and other cartoons. He initially wanted to become a commercial artist but after a year at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, Haring dropped, moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Haring immediately felt connected to the thriving alternative arts scene happening downtown in the late 1970s and became friends with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf.
Inspired by the ideals of “art as life” and moving the art experience out of galleries and into the streets, Haring’s first major works were his subway drawings. Haring produced over one hundred of these public works between 1980 and 1985, integrating his now-iconic exuberant, cartoonish outlined figures into everyday public space in a way that directly engaged its viewers. Haring recalled that the most important aspects of these works was the immediate engagement people had with them, asking him “what does it mean?” and giving him feedback that he’d then incorporate into future drawings. In this way, these works became reflections of the people who viewed them, responsive to and in dialogue with their environment. These works quickly garnered the attention of tastemakers in New York and his first solo exhibition was held at Westbeth Painters Space in 1981 and a celebrated show debuted at the high-profile Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York the following year.
Throughout the 1980s, Haring was committed to democratizing the art experience and along with paintings, he also created theater sets, billboards, murals, advertising campaigns and even a line of Swatch watches. In 1986 he opened the Pop Shop in SoHo, selling apparel, posters and toys bearing his drawings. This was a controversial move, as many galleries criticized Haring for “de-valuing” the art object while others, such as Andy Warhol, championed Haring’s insistence on making art accessible and affordable. Pop Shop was highly influential to contemporary crossovers of art and merchandise that are now so dominant, as in the work of Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, KAWS, Shepard Fairey and Takashi Murakami.
In addition to this ideology of accessibility, Haring was also very socially engaged and used his striking imagery to promote awareness of various political and social campaigns. His many notable public works included a mural on the western side of the Berlin Wall, the Crack is Wack mural in New York, and a mural for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and used his presence in the arts community to raise awareness of the crisis. In 1989, a year before his death, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, whose mission is to raise funds for AIDS organizations and children’s literacy and arts programs.
Since his death in 1990, Haring has become one of the most widely-recognized and celebrated artists of the 20th century, priming the path for the rise of graffiti and street art in the 21st century and a socially-conscious approach to talking about sexuality, intimacy and visibility through public art. Famed New York gallerist Jeffery Deitch asserts that Haring made “works that can hang in museums alongside masterpieces…and hold their own as art-historically important pieces,” expressly because they embrace and engage popular culture with an immediate and dynamic visual language that celebrates the joy and chaos of our society.
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