In the early hours of June 28th, 1969, the first rock was thrown outside the Stonewall Inn,
in Greenwich Village New York City. After years of police raids, intimidation, aggression, and arrests,
the drag queens, street boys, gay men and women had had enough, and they fought back - with protests
continuing for several nights. It would lead to the founding of the Gay Liberation movement.
Around the same time as the Stonewall riots were happening, ten-year-old Keith
Haring was living with his conservative parents in the suburbs of Pennsylvania.
He was passionate about art at a very young age, and his father, an amateur
cartoonist, encouraged his son's ambition to one day work for the Walt Disney Corporation.
Keith Haring was from a generation of kids born during the Cold War, who saw the
news as it happened - on TV. He was exposed to a whole new level of sophisticated advertising:
pitching products, ideas, desires, aspirations, and Concepts at Breakneck speed - as he sat on
the couch. This is where he developed his skills in simplifying complex ideas using memorable
graphics. He instinctively knew that a combination of slogans and visuals, could be a powerful force,
and later he would sell difficult politics in the same way Madison Avenue sold vacuum cleaners.
in 1978 Keith Haring left his perfectly safe Suburban life in Pennsylvania - because, as he
later said, he needed intensity for his art but also intensity in his life. And there was only one place to go - New York City.
TV Presenter: As long as anyone can remember people have been expressing themselves
by writing or drawing on public walls. There's a word for this - it's called "graffiti"
The city exposed Herring to Graffiti. Targeted by the authorities and overlooked by the art world, but
valued by Haring and others for its technical Mastery and direct connection to the public.
At College he was already experimenting with text and performance, but was attracted to Graffiti, which
often uses bold expressive lines and simplified forms to create impactful visuals. And Haring
adopted these characteristics in his own work. He developed a distinct style of fluid continuous
lines, and invented his own visual language. The Democratic nature of graffiti meant
he could create art that would reach and engage a broad public. It would be a career-long theme
for Haring: breaking down barriers between "high art" and "low art", bringing in an urban community,
and particularly working-class communities. He wanted his work accessible to everyone, and
not just the elite. He called the New York subway his "laboratory", experimenting with ideas and form.
Taking on the rectangles of black paper used to cover expired advertisements, Haring - using chalk -
did hundreds of drawings over a five-year period, and was arrested several times. The Simplicity of
the images was a necessity, as he had to work quickly to avoid getting caught. But sometimes
the hastily drawn panels, managed to perfectly capture the frenetic energy of New York City.
The radiant baby became his trademark. The beauty of Haring's work is its positive life-affirming
quality, and his Subway Works struck a nerve with blasé commuters facing the daily grind. They'd look
forward to seeing what he drew next and where, and before long mainstream media noticed him too and
almost overnight he became a star. Interviewer: "How did you manage that?", Haring: "At the same time that I was doing
things in the Subways I had began showing things in Galleries and things in the press and things".
Haring had kept his sexuality strictly under wraps from his conservative parents, but in New
York, he got to finally experience his authentic gay identity, in an environment that had been
fostered by The Stonewall riots. It was a cliché but it was true, you could be whatever you wanted
in New York City - and Keith Herring quickly found his tribe. For a period, the New York
club scene became the New York art scene, and at the iconic Club 57 located in a church basement
in the East Village, Haring would put on art shows, and become friends or friendly rivals with fellow
painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, joining artists creating work outside of the
elitist and restrictive world of the Galleries and museums. They weren't producing the austere
conceptual art being shown Uptown, but art that was noisy, dirty, chaotic, liberating, colourful, and fun.
Nightclubs were an important part of what shaped Haring's art. The music, the energy, and
above all the dancing, are all reflected in the fluidity and rhythm of his figures and his line.
TV reporter: "A mystery disease known as the gay plague. has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history
of American Medicine". The first time the public heard about AIDS was in 1981, when an article
described 41 cases of a rare cancer in young otherwise healthy gay men in Los Angeles.
It was the very beginning of the AIDS crisis, and the word soon became synonymous with death.
Haring's development as an artist and as a person, came at a conservative time in Western politics. Margaret
Thatcher was elected as UK leader in 1979, Ronald Reagan became the President of the U.S in 1981, and
Helmut Kohl became chancellor of Germany in 1982. It wasn't until September 1985, four years after
the first cases the Reagan even said the word AIDS. By that point it was a full-blown epidemic.
Keith Haring: "During the summer I start to notice trouble with my breathing. With inspecting every day
and waiting to see the purple splotch, and I found a spot on my leg". Herring was diagnosed
with AIDS in 1987. Just over two years later, at the height of his Fame, he was dead.
Haring knew his time was limited, and in those last two years he traveled all over the world,
creating work and organising shows. His list of "to-do" projects just got bigger.
Political activism had driven Haring's bright, brief career - and he truly believed in the power of
art to change the world. This belief, combined with the immediacy of his cartoon style, came
together spectacularly in the 1980s. He had made posters against apartheid in South Africa, and for
nuclear disarmament groups. Created works with inner city kids, produced anti-drugs
billboards, and posters that attacked those condemning sexual freedom - and then he went
for the American government, and it shockingly inadequate response to the AIDS crisis, with a
series of posters. And he also took time to create the Keith Haring Foundation, to raise money for AIDS
organizations and children's programs. To date it has raised 20 million dollars for charities.
it was during this Maelstrom of activity and one year into his diagnosis that he produced
his most iconic poster. The modern poster as we know it dates back to the mid-19th century when
the printing industry perfected colour lithography and made mass production of large and inexpensive
images possible. Many fine artists worked in the medium. Jules Chéret, was a French painter and lithographer who
became a master of Belle Epoch poster art. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters for the
Moulin Rouge, established him as one of the foremost poster artists of the late 19th century.
Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech Art Nouveau artist. One of the most prominent poster designers.
And the 20th century saw great artists like Ernst Keller and Victor Vasarely, producing limited edition posters
Haring had championed the poster format as a traditional form of political activism. He saw
in them the immediacy which we now think of, when we think of his aesthetic. It was in 1982 that he
created one of his first posters. He printed and paid for 30 000 of them which he gave out for
free during an anti-nuclear protest in New York. He would use his platform to get us talking about
socio-political issues often ignored, by employing a tradition used by political agitators since
printing began. There is a generosity to Haring often lacking in the art world. He was a populist
who wanted his work "out there" for the world to see - for free. The art establishment didn't really
understand it, but Haring really believed that art was for everybody. The artist saw the potential
in posters as a democratizing force. Affordable, mass-produced, and collectible. Public accessibility
was a consistent concern in Haring's work, and posters were a way to reach the widest audience possible.
Haring: "I mean it's definitely art for the age of mechanical reproduction".
The artist had used the "wise monkey" figures before in an earlier work that was inspired by the political organisation
"Act Up", who in 1987, had coined the slogans "Silence = Death" and "Ignorance = Fear"
The painting also has the pink triangle that Nazis used to identify gay people in concentration camps,
which had been appropriated by Act Up and reclaimed as a badge of Pride, The poster
uses a more paired down graphic than the original painting, and that was typical of Haring's punchy
street posters, which were designed to catch the eye of casual passers-by. This work was plastered
all over New York City, and became the most famous and impactful of all the AIDS activists work.
At the time he created this poster, the numbers of reported AIDS cases in the United States
had reached 100 000, and many couldn't afford the available medication. The mainstream was
unwilling to discuss it openly, but Keith Haring forced us to talk about AIDS.
Haring: "If you don't have money in this city, you know it's an expensive disease, and you can't get enough
money to get your AZT (medication), to get whatever you have, and you just give up".
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he told the world he was HIV positive. This was
so brave at a time that it was considered career suicide. Haring: "My work, and all art really is about life.
um especially um I mean my life is my work, my work is my life, and so the two things are completely
intertwined, and are almost one and the same. This is a man who had no shame in an "Era of Shame".
Who wouldn't be silenced when no one else was speaking up - and he spoke loudly and often against the
stigma and Prejudice associated with the disease. People still believed you could catch AIDS
from a kiss or even from a toilet seat - and religious leaders were loud in their condemnation
of any form of "Education as propaganda". Mainstream Society saw the disease as one that only affected
gay men, Haitians, sex workers, and drug addicts. But with "Ignorance = Fear", Haring portrays three
individuals, whose race and gender are not obvious. And by using his trademark "de-individualised",
"unisex" figures, he sends a coded message that everyone is a target. All three figures have a pink
X on their chests, symbolising AIDS patients, and are covering their ears mouth and eyes, like the
three wise monkeys who "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak no Evil". As with many of his primitive
figures, the three in the poster appear to be jumping or dancing. A reflection of the hip-hop
music he was obsessed with, and the club scene he hung out at. If you ignore the text, the work could
be read as a "fun clubbing Scene", it captures that energy - and that's the point. It draws you in with
its simple lines and primary colours, and then it hits you with its message - loud and clear. Somebody
had to shout about AIDS, and it might as well be Keith Haring. He never sketched beforehand or
planned anything, but let it flow spontaneously like "automated writing". His line was described
as "continuous", not because it is uninterrupted, but because it has a fluidity that runs through all
his Works - through dancing figures, barking dogs and crawling babies - and through time and space.
These graphic lines and colours, tap into a body of work that started on the New York subway, over
10 years before. In the simple, "visually fun" image, Haring encapsulates how a generation of gay men
were ignored. Too afraid to stand up and say something, because of fear - because of Shame.
This work - so simplistic on the surface, changed how people thought about AIDS.
And that is both subversive AND deeply profound.
In February 1990, Haring was seriously ill with late stage AIDS-related infections, including lymphoma.
He was receiving 24-hour care, when his Studio manager came in with a letter from the
Walt Disney Corporation. They wanted him to work on a Mickey Mouse project. He had dreamed of this
since he was a child - but - he didn't believe the letter was real, and thought his friend
was lying, to make him feel good. When he finally realised it was a genuine offer, it was too late.
Haring's death on February the 16th, 1990, meant he lost his chance to give Mickey Mouse new life.
He was only 32 years old