Last week I posted a list of 10 things I wished I created as assigned for my Design for Social Innovation Thesis course. Maggie Breslin examined my list, remarking that a couple of themes are "Beauty in relationship to tragedy; boiling down to the essence. One question she posed to me was, Why do you think the universal pursuit of happiness is buried in most people?
Be your own boss #hatersgonhate
A video posted by Margarita (@urbanpopartist) on Feb 1, 2015 at 1:39pm PST
With great freedom comes great responsibility. When it comes to the pursuit of happiness, we spend a lot of time procrastinating that responsibility to ourselves. And often, even our closest friends expect loyalty to others over loyalty to ourselves, when in reality folks might be more useful to the world around them if positioned in a more dope situation. Mapping your course to profound euphoria requires exploration, and that kind of self-examination can be scary. But if we keep our eyes on the prize, our capacity to be legendary, then it makes the countless hours hustling and scheming and pitching all the more worth it.
Haters will say that you have no right to be better than them, that you haven't earned that confidence. But I often look to Kanye for the empowerment of the individual. Specifically, When I think of competition, it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso. You know, the pyramids."
It sounds ridiculous from afar, but once you internalize it, Kanye's Kanfidence becomes a mantra that keeps you positioned in your mind's eye as a tsar of your fate, the boss of your enterprise. "I am Warhol! I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh. Walt Disney, Nike, Google." On his Yeezus tour, he proposed that nobody has the omniscience to declare that you are unworthy of categorizing yourself with those greats.
Last week's list contained 10 projects I wish I'd created, curated to include work that I felt made the kind of impact I would like to work towards. Examining deeper why I chose Keith Haring's Crack Is Wack wall in Harlem from 1986, I'll try an exercise Maggie recommends in which I pose a series of whys to dive deeper into why I'm so impressed.
Why did you choose the Crack is Wack wall?
I really like how Haring can communicate heavy topics in the simplest, most accessible way—stick figures.
I think the most important role that art has is to get us to stop believing and start thinking about issues that really affect us, and Haring is able to facilitate that kind of reflection to a wider range of people given the simplicity of his medium. It's just like Helvetica's role in Switzerland when it replaced a gaudy German font on all legal documents in order to democratize access to the legal system.
With great freedom comes great responsibility; If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything. If those are a given, then the artist's ability to connect folks to those internal missions is a responsibility in itself.
Maybe that's not what rings true for all artists, but I feel most empowered when I am facilitating creating on the part of others, reminding them that they are valid filters for the world they see around them, the universe that they come from. I call myself an artist, and I insist that everyone else is an artist too and should connect with that instinct-like ability to distill truths from the realities and surrealitiies observed.
"I'm like a vessell, and God has chosen me to be the voice and the connector." Another Kanye-ism, which I really love, though I do not believe in the exclusivity it conveys. Rather, we are all filters, and the more we are empowered to practice using our voices to translate universal truths, the more iterations each of us will have and the more seasoned. We should all be as cocky as Kanye, empowered enough to keep our greatest ideas alive through confident transmission to folks we trust. Ultimately, the work we do through our art should theoretically "make the world a better place."
So what are some milestones in the history of Haring's construction of the Crack Is Wack wall that eventually became the Crack Is Wack Playground?
As posted on the sign in the park,
In 1978, Haring came to New York with a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts. The graffiti he saw throughout the city immediately appealed to Haring's artistic sense of spontaneity and the possibilities for political messages. Soon Haring began using building facades and subway walls as canvases for his own graffiti art. Most of his subway graffiti was benign, as it was done in white chalk on the blank black background of unused advertising panels. Though Haring was arrested several times for illegally spray painting building walls, Haring continued to create his distinctive murals. Haring believed that art should be accessible to everyone, and his philosophy is reflected in both the simplicity of his figures and the public medium through which he chose to express himself. As his signature chalk outlines of interlocking bodies grew in fame, Haring gained the respect of the international art community and the appreciation of the public. One interpretation of Haring's work holds that he is suggesting how diverse groups of people can live together in harmony.
As published in the Huffington Post article, Keith Haring's 'Crack is Wack': NYC's Most Famous Mural?
How Crack is Wack came to be is not well-known. Nor is the fact that the mural is not the original version.
Benny was one of the major catalysts for Crack is Wack. Benny was Haring's young, gifted studio assistant in the mid-1980s who became addicted to crack. Haring and the rest of his studio were close with him and they tried everything to help him kick his addiction. This was, according to Haring, an incredibly distressing experience for everyone involved. Benny had no health insurance, so they initially called cocaine hotlines and Benny started to see a counselor, but that didn't work. Haring's studio also went to emergency rooms to try to get him into a guided program, but no hospital would take him.
Around this time, Haring often drove past a handball court located in a small park near the Harlem River Drive. The court was clearly visible from the highway but abandoned. Nothing fenced in the court and no one played on it (because if you did, the ball would just go onto the highway). According to Haring, the location seemed a perfect spot to paint. It was almost identical to a highway billboard.
The subject for the painting quickly became crack. (In Haring's words, "Inspired by Benny [who was eventually cured], and appalled by what was happening in the country, but especially New York, and seeing the slow reaction (as usual) of the government to respond, I decided I had to do an anti-crack painting.")
Haring painted Crack is Wack without asking for permission. One morning, during the summer of 1986, he drove a rented van -- loaded with some ladders from his studio and some new fluorescent orange paint he had bought -- up to Harlem to paint.
He finished the entire mural in one day.
Haring paints the mural on the handball courts off Harlem River Drive at 127th.
Haring painted this playground's mural on October 3, 1986 to call attention to the damage drugs can inflict on community welfare. He continued to create murals, sculptures, drawings, and paintings until he died of AIDS on February 16, 1990, at the age of 32. His artwork is highly prized throughout the world. The Keith Haring Foundation, which Haring created shortly before his death, continues to educate the public about Haring's life and work and raises money for children's and AIDS charities.
This peace was short-lived. As Haring and his crew were taking some last-minute pictures and smoking a joint, a cop car drove up and one of the policemen started harassing them. The cop asked if Haring had permission to create the mural, and obviously he didn't. Haring was then arrested and handed a court date. He faced a fine and potentially jail time.
In the next days and weeks, the mural was quickly picked up by the news media, not because of Haring's arrest -- no one knew he had been arrested -- but because of the newsworthiness of crack cocaine and Reagan's "War on Drugs" then in the United States. Haring explained: "Every time the news did a story on crack, they would flash to the [mural as a visual]. NBC [even] did a public service announcement using it as a background."
Close to the court date, the New York Post contacted Haring and asked if they could take a picture of him in front of the mural. In the process of taking it, they learned about Haring's arrest and were shocked. They had no idea he was going to soon be in court and had been arrested for making the mural. The next day the Post ran an article about Haring and the mural with the information that he could go to jail for a year.
People immediately came to Haring's defense. The topic even made the evening news, which prompted Mayor Edward Koch -- who was both anti-crack and anti-graffiti -- to have to consider the issue. Koch commented that "we have to find somewhere else for Haring to paint."
Haring eventually was fined only $100. After the court date, the Parks Commissioner wrote to Haring to apologize to him and offer any help he could provide, since the mural was actually Parks Department property, not city property.
Roughly a week later the mural was vandalized. Someone in the neighborhood turned it into a pro-crack mural. And then, according to Haring, to deal with this, some "busy bee in the Parks Department" took it upon themselves to paint over the entire mural in gray without consulting his supervisors. So Crack is Wack was then gone.
Upon learning that the work had been painted-over, the Parks Department commissioner called Haring and apologized (again). He then asked if Haring would consider repainting the piece with his department's assistance.
Haring then repainted Crack is Wack -- though differently than the original version.
To ensure that the message of Haring's mural will continue to reach parkgoers, Parks and the Keith Haring Foundation restored the mural in July 1995. Another restoration project followed in 2007.