Keith Haring

Keith Allen Haring was born on May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Kutztown, the eldest of four children of an engineer father who drew cartoons and a homemaker mother. He copied the line drawings of Dr. Seuss and Charles Schulz from childhood and had his first solo show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 1978 while studying at the Ivy School of Professional Art.

He moved to New York in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts and immersed himself in the East Village downtown scene around the Mudd Club and Club 57. In 1980 he began drawing in white chalk on the matte black paper used to cover unsold advertising spaces in the New York subway, producing thousands of Subway Drawings that brought him a daily public audience.

By 1982, Haring's bold-outlined radiant babies, barking dogs, and dancing figures had moved into galleries, including a sold-out solo show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. He worked alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna, and Andy Warhol, painted public murals from Berlin to Pisa, and in 1986 opened the Pop Shop in SoHo to sell his imagery on T-shirts, badges, and posters at low prices.

Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and used his last two years to fund AIDS research and advocacy through the Keith Haring Foundation, which he established in 1989. He died of AIDS-related complications in New York City on February 16, 1990, aged thirty-one. His estate continues to support children's programs and AIDS organizations.

The name Keith comes from a Scottish surname-turned-given-name, derived from a place name in East Lothian; the underlying Brittonic root coed means wood or forest. It became a popular boy's name in mid-twentieth-century America. He carried it lightly, a forest-rooted Scottish name fitted to a man whose drawings sprang up like new growth on city walls.