Heads up! This edition contains several of Keith Haring’s selected artworks. If reading in your inbox, be sure images are displayed.

Happy Pride Month! All month long, I’ll be taking a look at some of the LGBTQ+ artists who have had a profound impact on my understanding of and appreciation for literature, art, and culture, and discussing the ongoing impact and legacy of their work.

We’re going to kick off our Pride series by talking about one of my favorite artists: Keith Haring.

Haring has been one of my favorite artists for a while. His work is whimsical and manages to take very rudimentary shapes and elevate them into something engaging and evocative.

I’ve recently been reading his collected journals – Keith Haring Journals from Penguin Classics– and have developed a newfound appreciation for him as a person, an artist, and a borderline philosopher. That’s what I want to spend some time unpacking. How, over the course of his career, did he make sense of and live out his artistic ethos?

“Art is for Everybody” | Unpacking Haring’s Art Philosophy

Haring’s collected journals span from 1977 to 1989, covering his late teens and early twenties, as he hitchhiked to Grateful Dead shows, the peak of his career starting in his mid-twenties, and the last months of his life, when he used his platform to continue raising awareness about the AIDS crisis.

Even in his preliminary entries, while he’s still in his early twenties, it’s clear that Keith is already developing his sense of taste as an artist, but also his understanding of why he creates art and what it means to create art.

One of the first entries, a long piece Haring wrote while seated in Washington Square Park, includes a long discussion about change being the default state for the human condition. Haring reflects that most people choose to ignore the constant state of change they are undergoing – from the unseen changes of cellular division to aging to the fluctuation of moods from day to day – and seek to resist change that they cannot control.

In acknowledging that everything and everyone is constantly changing, Haring remarks:

From there, he goes on to state that he keeps writing because it is how he grapples with and makes sense of his constantly shifting reality. He then dovetails his own written exploration of how he makes sense of the world into a conversation about the function of visual art, and how it intersects with language and understanding.

While still very early in his career, it’s interesting that he’s already reflecting on hieroglyphics and pictograms as a means of conveying poetry or meaning through imagery. Throughout his career, his work is often compared to hieroglyphics and functions as pictograms, suggesting that his desire to make sense of the world through reflection and capture visual poetry is a key factor in his work.

In the same journal entry, he goes on to pen what I consider to be the first draft of his personal art philosophy. Throughout this long section (which I won’t reproduce in its entirety here due to the length), Haring rejects the idea that the goal of art should be to be easily understood or concretely defined, and asserts that it is in an individual finding meaning within a piece of art that gives it its value. Here is where the ethos of Haring’s oeuvre starts to take shape. He writes:

In later journal entries, Haring looks back at his previous writings and reflects a sense of youthful eagerness and naivety in what he had written, but he underscores that he doesn’t think he was incorrect in entries such as this one from 1978. If he shows signs of being critical of his earlier entries, it’s purely a matter of style and refinement, not a shift in ethos. A 1986 entry written from Montreux, Switzerland, in fact, preserves his sentiment about art and meaning as he reflects, “The need to separate ourselves and connect ourselves to our environment (world) is a primary need of all human beings. Art becomes the way we define our existence as human beings.”

This sentiment—that art is how we define our existence as people—is the undercurrent behind his mission and creative ethos: “Art is for everybody.”

Art is for everybody because we all spend our lives wrestling with questions about meaning, purpose, and identity, and art is the medium through which we can create a sense of understanding across these facets of our personhood.

Haring’s Work as a Societal Mirror

As with all art, Haring’s work didn’t just reflect his whims and, clearly, wasn’t simply a matter of personal aesthetics.

Throughout Haring’s journals, he reflects discomfort, fear, and a desire to find hope amidst the challenges facing society at that time. Themes of nuclear proliferation, the crack epidemic, South African apartheid, and the impact of technological advancement all crop up across his work.

Haring’s efforts to make his work accessible and visible to the public meant that he was often working on large murals and other displays that were present in public spaces. While many of his paintings were exhibited in galleries, it was essential to Haring that his work not be reserved for a wealthy elite, despite the fact that by the early and mid-1980s, he could have been an exclusive, high-ticket creator due to his status and popularity as an artist.

As Haring made sense of the world and wrestled with his fears about the future through his artwork, he shared it with the public. A prolific artist who frequently engaged in creating chalk drawings on the walls of the New York City subway system, crafting large murals and public installations, and in the form of t-shirts and other consumer goods through his Pop Shop, Haring invited others in to reflect on their own awareness and level of comfort with the issues and topics that he deeply cared about.

The AIDS Epidemic

Among the issues facing society during Haring’s life, the AIDS crisis was what Haring was perhaps the most vocal about, or at least about which he was the most prolifically engaged in processing his feelings through his artwork.

With the Reagan administration refusing to intervene in matters of public health concerning gay people, and often outright mocking the deaths of gay men who died from AIDS-related complications, the 1980s were a harrowing time for queer people. The CDC conservatively estimates that between 1981 and 1990, AIDS killed at least 100,777 people in the United States. The actual number may be significantly higher as AIDS care and research were intentionally underfunded (and often openly blocked by the Reagan administration), and the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS forced many not to seek medical care.

In 1987, Haring discovered he was HIV positive, and by the fall of 1988, he received an AIDS diagnosis. He experienced breathing difficulties and noticed a purple spot on his leg. With many of his friends having already succumbed to the disease, he was taken aback that he hadn't fallen ill sooner.

Even after his diagnosis, however, Haring continued to create. In 1988, one of the motifs that crops up in his work represents a demonic sperm cell, which seems to represent the insidious spread of HIV and its ability to infiltrate all facets of one’s life.

Haring passed away from AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990. He was 31 years old.

Despite the regrettable shortness of his life, Haring’s work continues to influence artists today. KAWS, Banksy, and Jonas Fisch continue Haring’s legacy of making bold, inquisitive works in public places, and his works of advocacy – especially the Silence = Violence slogan and the motifs with the inverted pink triangle– continue to adorn protest signs, hats, and t-shirts on the frontlines of today’s fight for equality.

Almost prophetically, in 1978, a few years before the first cases of AIDS were reported to the CDC, Haring wrote the following in his journal, seemingly aware of the fact that he would leave the world without finishing everything he set out to do:

Their lives are stopped before their ideas are completed is a notion that we see echoes of in 1989, shortly before Haring’s passing. With his AIDS diagnosis and deteriorating health, Haring started a painting that he knew he would never finish. Unlike the artists who ran out of time to finish their discoveries that he opined about in 1978, by 1989 Haring was staring his mortality in the eyes and wrestled with coming to terms with his inevitable passing.

In his painting, typically referred to as The Unfinished Painting or just Unfinished, Haring paints the upper left quadrant in his signature geometric style, but lets wet paint run down the canvas and leaves the rest of it blank.

For most of his career, Haring would start by painting the border of his work before getting started, but in Unfinished, he doesn’t. He paints the top corner without completing the border, almost as if he is accepting that he can’t continue on as “normal.”

The paint that drips down the front of the painting resembles tears, whether those of us as viewers, Haring as the artist, or the painting itself, mourning what will never be.

The part of the painting that he created maintains his usual sense of joy, whimsy, and playfulness that his work embodies. It invites us into an intimate moment with the artwork, prompting us to consider what could have been.

It’s a call-to-action. It asks us to mourn the loss of the thousands who died during the AIDS crisis without having the opportunity to “complete” themselves and realize their dreams, their potential, their hopes. It also reminds us why Pride and advocacy are so important; countless deaths could have been avoided if public health and fairness were prioritized over stigma and petty political bickering.

Haring’s life, his art, and his journals are also a call-to-action to keep creating. To be curious. To engage with art in our search for meaning. To acknowledge those who came before us and to set the stage for those coming after us. To hold up a mirror in equal measure to our fears and our hopes.

Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Blake Reichenbach

Like our Content? Support Inkwell Insights

It’s easy to support Inkwell Insights. Simply click on an ad to one of our sponsors, purchase a book through one of our links, or just share the newsletter with your friends.

Daily News for Curious Minds

Be the smartest person in the room by reading 1440! Dive into 1440, where 4 million Americans find their daily, fact-based news fix. We navigate through 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive roundup from every corner of the internet – politics, global events, business, and culture, all in a quick, 5-minute newsletter. It's completely free and devoid of bias or political influence, ensuring you get the facts straight. Subscribe to 1440 today.

Sign up now!