Keith Haring (1958 – 1990) – art that danced

Keith Haring Icons

Keith Haring was best known for his graffiti-like painting, initially on the black paper used to cover discontinued billboard advertisements in the New York subway. After a feverish 1980’s style career of surging popular success and grudging critical attention, Haring died of AIDS, February 16 1990, at 31.

Art is for Everyone

Keith Haring

I have been a fan of Keith Haring, the young artist who started making chalk drawings on blank advertising panels in New York subway stations that helped spark an international street art movement. I was a teenager in the 80s in New York when he had his heyday. I remember in 1986 Haring subway drawing when I travelled on the trains, and it was the first time I realised his mandate, “that art is for everyone.”

Haring conveyed the Human Condition

Making sense of Haring’s signs was easy; they quickly communicated important human events; birth, love, sex and war. Recalling Star Wars movies of the late 1970s and early 80s, special effects technology joined the mix. His art, babies, dancers, TV sets, computers and spaceships symbolically radiant with the mantra “may the force be with you,” summed up the world according to Haring.

Three Lithographs, 1985 by Keith Haring
Three Lithographs, 1985 by Keith Haring

Haring’s art was the perfect reflection of its time. Break dancing was central to his imagery. He made many figures that twirled on their heads. A young gay artist that found his way in New York during the heady days of the aids epidemic, Haring made art that mirrored the era’s kind of free-floating sexuality and homosexuality. He grew up in the clubs. It was all music, dancing and sex.

Art exuding energy

Haring refined his collection of signs with skill and speed. Stilted dogs painted on paper in 1980 and clunky babies marked on a subway map soon evolved into more confident forms. His images, particularly his barking dog and the “radiant child”, were internationally known.

Keith Haring’s Ignorance = Fear, 1989. Photograph: © Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring’s Ignorance = Fear, 1989. Photograph: © Keith Haring Foundation

Haring depicted demons as well as angels. He foresaw an apocalyptic catastrophe — his running monsters and whirling yet orderly lines, brilliantly composed, belong in our technological age. He was not a sentimentalist. He wrote of evil and greed.

The Japanese understood his work.

In Japan, his work was understood. The Japanese responded to it; he felt it was tied to their traditions of the ‘sign’ and the gesture and the concept of the ‘spirit of the line’ evident in Sumi painting and calligraphy.

High and Low Art

What American museum curators initially could not see was Haring’s employment of high and low art. Haring understood clearly that the information age and the camera had blurred the boundaries between high and low art. Haring maintained a friendship with Andy Warhol. Haring provided Warhol access to the alternative scene, which Warhol exploited as a source of inspiration. Haring created the figure of Andy Mouse, based on Mickey Mouse, in 1985. The background is reminiscent of the Stars and Stripes, and the motif of Andy Mouse is supplemented by dollar signs in the ears of the mouse. By combining the Walt Disney product with the Andy Warhol product, Haring accords his friend the same iconic status.

Commercial Resilience

Since a few seasons ago, the Parisian brand Études has used Haring graphics in its work, just before Watanabe in Japan. The creative directors of Études, Aurélien Arbet and Jérémie Egry dug deeper into New York’s New Wave than just its hip-hop music and Kryolan spray cans found on the street. In the 1980s, Haring was a strong voice because of his work on Aids awareness, apartheid, and crack addiction. Somewhere Downtown, a new show at UCCA in Beijing looks at his place in the chaotic city of New York when he first started making art. Chaos and Hope, Haring’s first show at the Nakamura gallery in Japan, is being shown again to mark the gallery’s 15th anniversary.

Keith Haring was a big part of André Heller’s book Luna Luna, about an art theme park in Hamburg in the 1980s. The New York Public Library has more than 100 books with his work in its collection. He wanted his work seen by many people for as long as possible. His work in fashion was an essential part of his plan. Malcolm McLaren was the first to put Keith Haring’s art on the runway. He used it to package his Duck Rock album. Gil Vazquez is glad that Dijon went back to the early archives. She works with HIV and AIDS awareness charities, and black transwomen are some of the most vulnerable people in the community. Haring’s collection with Dijon is still for sale online at places like Farfetch and resale sites, and Basquiat’s art was used in her most recent collection.

Keith Haring was one of the first artists to make art products that people could wear, collect, and buy for a low price. Haring opened the Pop Shop on Lafayette Street to sell clothes, jewellery, toys, and posters. Many people who came to New York would make a point of going there. Haring worked with Artestar’s founder, David Stark. The Valentine’s Day deals at Primark are different from Honey’s story about the clubland, and Stark has worked with Haring on more than 2,000 projects since 1989. His art is still a language we use today (Have We Reached Peak Keith Haring?, 2023).

Keith Haring Foundation

The Keith Haring Foundation was set up in 1989 to raise awareness of Keith Haring’s work and ideas alive, grow them, and keep them safe. It gives money to non-profit groups that help children and groups that teach about AIDS, try to stop it and care for people who have it. Haring also asked the Foundation to keep his artistic memory alive and safe after he died. The Foundation keeps a collection of art and records. It helps arts and education organisations by funding exhibitions, programs, and books that put Haring’s work and ideas in context and explain them.

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Sources

Have we reached peak Keith Haring? (2023, March 6). Have We Reached Peak Keith Haring? | Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/2605aa4c-780f-4dfe-aaf7-48b16d57ba9c

Kolossa, A., Haring, K. (2004). Haring. Germany: Taschen.

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    Elbert Green Hubbard (1856 – 1915) was an American furniture designer. Hubbard met William Morris in 1894 and the following year inspired by Morris’s Kelmscott Press, founded the Raycroft Press’ East Aurora, near Buffalo, New York. He was the founder of the Roycrofters, an Arts and Crafts community; he organized workshops, lectured, and wrote as…


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  • Frank Nuovo (b.1961) Chief Designer for Nokia

    Frank Nuovo (b.1961) Chief Designer for Nokia

    Nuovo studied product and automotive design and graphics and communications design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.Read More →


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  • Faience Manufacturing Company – the heart of American ceramics

    Faience Manufacturing Company – the heart of American ceramics

    The Faience Manufacturing Company was an American manufacturing company that operated between 1880 – 1892 in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, New York. There is little evidence of the remains of the Company as it failed in 1892.Read More →


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  • Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) American sculptor and designer.

    Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) American sculptor and designer.

    Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), was an American sculptor and designer. He was born in Los Angeles and professionally active in New York. He was influential and well-received in the twentieth century. He produced sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, and set designs throughout his lifetime of creative experimentation. His work, both subtle and bold,…


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  • Ulrich Franzen (1921 – 2012) German-born American architect and designer

    Ulrich Franzen (1921 – 2012) German-born American architect and designer

    Ulrich Franzen, the German-born American architect, was a leading figure in the first post-war generation of American architects; including Paul Rudolph, Harry Cobb, John Maclane Johansen, and Philip Johnson. Read More →


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  • Geoffrey Beene (1927-2004) an American Fashion Designer

    Geoffrey Beene (1927-2004) an American Fashion Designer

    Geoffrey Beene (1927 – 2004) was an American fashion designer; born Haynesville, Louisiana. He was a premed student at Tulane University when he found himself sketching gowns when he became bored during his lectures. Along with Bill Blass, he was regarded as the Godfather of American sportswear. Read More →


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  • Raymond Loewy (1893 – 1986) 🇺🇸 American Designer

    Raymond Loewy (1893 – 1986) 🇺🇸  American Designer

    He arrived in the United States in 1929, just in time for the great depression. As it happened the beginning of the depression was a fortuitous time for a talented designer with new ideas to arrive in the United States. The old design aesthetic was disappearing with the collapsing economy. Manufacturers wanted to stimulate demand…


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  • Angelo Testa (1921 – 1984) American fabric designer

    Angelo Testa (1921 – 1984) American fabric designer

    Angelo Testa (1921 – 1984) was an American fabric designer. He studied at the Institute of Design, Chicago, to 1945. As well as being a fabric designer, he was a painter and sculptor. He designed the 1941 Little Man abstract floral fabric, widely published and hailed as a new direction in textile design. It all…


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  • How Paul Rand influenced Steve Jobs to accept the the visual identity for NeXT.

    How Paul Rand influenced Steve Jobs to accept the the visual identity for NeXT.

    During Steve Job’s time at NeXT he commissioned graphic designer Paul Rand to create the visual identity for NeXT. Rand had the reputation for exerting great influence on his clients, he created a 100-page branding book to help Steve Jobs understand the entire design process hidden behind the NeXT identity. Read More →


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  • Calvin Klein (b.1942) American fashion designer

    Calvin Klein (b.1942) American fashion designer

    Klein’s excellent, modest tailoring and beautiful sportswear lines, as well as his casual separates created in the finest linens, silks, and cashmere, had earned him a name by the mid-1970sRead More →


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  • Hartmut Esslinger (b.1945) a German Industrial Designer

    Hartmut Esslinger (b.1945) a German Industrial Designer

    Hartmut Esslinger (born June 5, 1944) is a German-American industrial designer and inventor. He is best known for founding the design consultancy frog, and his work for Apple Computers in the early 1980s.Read More →


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  • Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971) 🇺🇸 🇷🇺 graphic designer and magazine art director

    Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971) 🇺🇸 🇷🇺  graphic designer and magazine art director

    Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971) was an American/Russian graphic designer and magazine art director. Alexey Brodovitch was born in Russia and worked in Paris in the 1920s, creating books, posters, furniture, and advertising. He moved to America in 1930 and worked as the art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine in New York after a brief…


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  • William Dwiggins (1880 -1956) – Typographer and all-rounder

    William Dwiggins (1880 -1956) – Typographer and all-rounder

    Dwiggins was known for his “Metro” series of typefaces, the first designed specifically for newspaper headlines. He produced that in 1929 when he won the gold medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.Read More →


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  • Paul McCobb (1917 – 1969) American furniture designer

    Paul McCobb (1917 – 1969) American furniture designer

    One of the leading designers of the American design movement from the mid-20th centuryRead More →


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  • Hilton McConnico (1943 – 2018) American interior and furniture designer

    Hilton McConnico (1943 – 2018) American interior and furniture designer

    Hilton McConnico ( 1943 – 2018) was American furniture and interior designer. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He worked professionally in Paris.Read More →


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  • Dominick Labino (1910 – 1987) American glassware designer and ceramicist

    Dominick Labino (1910 – 1987) American glassware designer and ceramicist

    He began his work as an instrument builder for the Bacharach Instrument Company in Pittsburgh. He then moved on to Owens-Illinois Glass Company, where he developed a lifetime interest in glass. He established small laboratories to create new glass batches and fabricate small glass objects while in command of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company milk-bottle plant.…


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  • Harvey Littleton (1922 – 2013) American glassware designer

    Harvey Littleton (1922 – 2013) American glassware designer

    Between 1939-42 and 1946-47, he studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, receiving a bachelor’s degree in design. In 1941 and 1949-51, he studied Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, receiving a master’s degree in ceramics. In 1945, he was a student at the Brighton School of Art, Brighton, under Nora Braden’s…


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  • Ray and Charles Eames a partnership

    Ray and Charles Eames a partnership

    They were full collaborators as husband and wife. Design is infrequently a solitary endeavour, and husband-and-wife teams are not uncommon. The collaborative nature of the Eames work, on the other hand, was easily obscured by Charles’s widespread public recognition as an individual designer and thinker.Read More →


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  • John Eberson (1875 – 1954) American Designer famous for the atmospheric theatre

    John Eberson (1875 – 1954) American Designer famous for the atmospheric theatre

    John Eberson was an american designer who was known for his cinema décors. One of his earliest, the 1923 Majestic Theatre in Houston, Texas, was a loosely recreated garden of a late-Renaissance palazzo in Italy. Through his workshop Michelangelo Studios, he was was successful at producing elaborate plasterwork for his theatre décors in Spanish, Moorish,…


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  • Emeco American Designer Furniture

    Emeco American Designer Furniture

    Wilton C. Dinges founded the Electric Machine and Equipment Company (Emeco) in 1944 with $300 in savings and a used lathe for machine work. He started bidding on government manufacturing contracts out of a loft in Baltimore, Maryland, beginning with experimental antennas and jet engine parts. Read More →


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  • LaGardo Tackett (1911 – 1992) American Ceramicist

    LaGardo Tackett (1911 – 1992) American Ceramicist

    He ran a pottery studio from 1946 to 1954. He taught at Los Angeles’s California School of Design, where he and his students developed outdoor pottery planters, which resulted in establishing the Architectural Pottery in 1950.Read More →


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  • Arthur J. Pulos (1917- 1993) American industrial designer and educator

    Arthur J. Pulos (1917- 1993) American industrial designer and educator

    Arthur Pulos (1917 – 1993) was a well-known design teacher, promoter, and industrial designer. Arthur Pulos was renowned for his writings, lectures in developed and developing nations, and involvement with important organizations like the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID).Read More →


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  • Tucker Viemeister (b.1948) American Product Designer

    Tucker Viemeister (b.1948) American Product Designer

    Tucker Viemeister graduated from Yellow Springs High School in 1966, went to two different colleges. He ended up studying industrial design at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, from which he graduated with a degree in industrial design in 1974. Read More →


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  • Dakota Jackson (b.1950) American furniture designer

    Dakota Jackson (b.1950) American furniture designer

    Dakota Jackson is an American furniture designer best known for his Dakota Jackson furniture line. He was a magician’s son, and by the time he was six, he became a professional magician. He performed in public until his early 20s.Read More →


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  • Thomas Molesworth (1890 – 1977) an American furniture designer

    Thomas Molesworth (1890 – 1977) an American furniture designer

    Molesworth ranch style furniture has inspired contemporary Western furniture designers such as Jim Covert, Jeff Morris and Marc Tagesger with its large brass pads, Native American motifs and wildfire imagery.Read More →


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  • Ray Komai (1918 – 2010 ) American Graphic, Industrial and Interior Designer

    Ray Komai (1918 – 2010 ) American Graphic, Industrial and Interior Designer

    Ray Komai was a Japanese American; he was a graphic, industrial and interior designer. He studied in Los Angeles at the Art Center College. He settled in New York in 1944, where he worked in advertising and set up a graphic design and advertising office (with Carter Winter). J.G. Furniture created Komai’s 1949 moulded plywood…


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  • Eugene Schoen (1880 – 1957) was an American architect and designer

    Eugene Schoen (1880 – 1957) was an American architect and designer

    He set up his architecture practice in New York in 1905 and, after visiting the 1925 Paris ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.’ He began offering interior design services. In 1931, he became a professor of interior architecture at New York University. He sold his own and imported textiles and furniture and Maurice…


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  • Candace Wheeler (1827 – 1923) American textile and wallpaper designer

    Candace Wheeler (1827 – 1923) American textile and wallpaper designer

    THE MOTHER OF INTERIOR DESIGN She is noted for helping to open the field of interior design to women, supporting craftswomen, and for encouraging a new style of American design.Read More →


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  • Richard Josef Neutra (1892 – 1970) Austrian American Architect & Designer

    Richard Josef Neutra (1892 – 1970) Austrian American Architect & Designer

    Richard Josef Neutra (1892 – 1970) was an Austrian American artist and designer. He was born in Vienna and lived in Los Angeles and southern California for much of his life.Read More →


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  • Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848 – 1907) Irish American sculptor

    Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848 – 1907) Irish American sculptor

    Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848 – 1907) Irish American sculptorRead More →


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  • Michael Graves (1934 – 2015) – American architect and industrial designer

    Michael Graves (1934 – 2015) – American architect and industrial designer

    Alessi Design Collection Michael Graves (1934 – 2015) was an architect and industrial designer from the United States. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey. Read More →


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  • Alexander Girard (1907 – 1993) American interior, & Textile designer

    Alexander Girard (1907 – 1993) American interior,  & Textile designer

    Alexander Girard (1907 – 1993) was a man of many design talents. He trained as an architect, and he practisedRead More →


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  • Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) American Designer & Artist

    Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) American Designer & Artist

    He worked as an engineer in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1919, and as a draftsperson and engineer in West Coast logging camps from 1919 to 23; from 1923 to 1930, he was active in New York, sketching for the National Police Gazette 1925—26; in 1926, he travelled to England and Paris, where he produced his…


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  • Don Albinson (1921- 2008) – American furniture designer

    Don Albinson (1921- 2008) – American furniture designer

    The 1965 stacking Albinson chair produced by Knoll was similar to British Designer’s Robin Day trendy chair for Hille, although Albinson’s was more sophisticated. They stack, hook together side by side and comfortable to sit in. After Knoll he became a consultant designer to Westinghouse on office seating and furniture systems.Read More →


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  • Winold Reiss (1886-1953) German artist and designer

    Winold Reiss (1886-1953) German artist and designer

    Influenced by the international modern art movements that had recently swept across Europe, he blended cubism, which used geometric shapes to create abstract images, and fauvism, which favoured the use of bold colours to suggest shapes, with interest in ethnography to create a unique style of portraiture that sought to reveal the subject more thoroughly…


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  • Herb Lubalin (1918 – 1981) renowned graphic designer

    Herb Lubalin (1918 – 1981) renowned graphic designer

    Renowned American graphic designer, Herb Lubalin, best known for his collaborations with Ralph Ginzburg on the magazines Eros, Fact and  Avant Garde,  is regarded as one of the seminal designers of the 20th century. The, 17 March 2018, will mark what would have been Lubalin’s 100th birthday.Read More →


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  • Ray Eames an American Designer

    Ray Eames an American Designer

    Ray Eames (b. Bernice Alexandra Kaiser 1912-88) was an American designer. She was born in Sacramento, California. She was the wife of Charles Eames. Read More →


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  • Milton Glaser (1929 – 2020) American Graphic Designer

    Milton Glaser (1929 – 2020) American Graphic Designer

    Co-founder of Push Tin Studios. The colourful posters of designer-illustrator Milton Glaser epitomise an era for the Woodstock generation. His psychedelic ‘American Sixties style’ was a synthesis of various influences ranging from Surrealism to Islamic painting.Read More →


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Alphonse Mucha (1860 – 1939) – Moravian decorator and painter – Encyclopedia of Design

Alphonse Mucha (1860 – 1939) was a Moravian decorator, painter, and graphic artist. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Mucha is well known for his Art Nouveau posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. Mucha first designed stage sets in Vienna; moved to Munich, in 1885 and Paris in 1887.

Explore 5 popular topics on Google Arts and Culture – Encyclopedia of Design

The following are 5 popular topics that are published on Google and Arts and Culture. It is one of my favourite parts of the Google universe.

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