H A R I N G

"My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can."

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Keith Haring photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi, Paris environs, France, 1989

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“No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were seventy-five. There would still be new ideas. There would still be things that you wished you would have accomplished. You could work for several lifetimes… And there are no regrets. Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time, and it is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.” - Keith Haring

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Keith Haring (May 4, 1958 - February 16, 1990) “I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.”

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Keith Haring painting a mural on the Houston Bowery Wall in New York City, 1982.

Photos by Tseng Kwong Chi

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Keith Haring for Lucky Strike, 1987

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Pop Shop IV, 1989 Keith Haring

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Keith Haring during a block party where he painted a mural on the handball court at P.S. 97 on the Lower East Side, August 1985.

Photos by Tseng Kwong Chi

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Keith Haring photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi in the New York City subway, circa 1983-84.

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Keith Haring photographed by Ozier Muhammad for Newsday, 1986.

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Keith Haring photographed by Andy Warhol in his studio, 1983.

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Keith Haring painting a carousel for André Heller’s Luna Luna, 1987. 

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Rolling Stone: What made you want to be an artist?

Keith Haring: “My father made cartoons. Since I was little, I had been doing cartoons, creating characters and stories. In my mind, though, there was a separation between cartooning and being a quote-unquote artist. When I made the decision to be an artist, I began doing these completely abstract things that were as far away from cartooning as you could go. It was around the time that I was taking hallucinogens – when I was sixteen or so. Psychedelic shapes would come like automatic writing, come out of my unconscious. The drawings were abstract, but you’d see things in them.”

Keith Haring photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi Bordeaux, France, 1985

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Grace Jones painted by Keith Haring, by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1984

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Art In Transit

Photo by Tseng Kwong Chi, 1984.

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“…at the height of his fame in 1989, Haring attacked the prejudice surrounding the growing AIDS crisis with his painting Silence = Death, which features figures covering their eyes and ears and a pink triangle (the badge gay men were forced to wear in the Nazi death camps, and appropriated in the 70s and 80s as a symbol of gay pride).”

Silence = Death, 1989

Keith Haring

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Keith Haring photographed by Jeannette Montgomery Barron in his studio, 1985.

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Keith Haring photographed by Baptiste Lignel in his studio on October 30, 1988.