After Keith Allen Haring (1958-1990) American, Mixed Media on Paper. Depicts the Radiant Baby figure five times in a sort of chorus kick line. Signed lower right. 

Overall Size: 17 3/4 x 23 3/4 in. 

Sight Size: 11 1/4 x 17 1/4 in.

#3474 . 

Keith Allen Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4th, 1958. His father was an engineer and amateur cartoonist who encouraged him to draw. His early influences included Walt Disney and Looney Tunes characters. He graduated from Kutztown Area High School in 1976 and studied commercial art for two years at Pittsburgh’s Ivy School of Professional Art, but eventually lost interest and dropped out. While attending college he had a maintenance job at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center, where he explored the art of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock. He moved to the Lower East Side of New York in 1978 to study painting at the School of Visual Arts, working as a busboy and studying semiotics in his free time. He experimented with video and performance art, gradually developing a signature style of his own emerging from the Pop Art movement, with Andy Warhol as his mentor. He began to produce spontaneous drawings in New York City subways after discovering the underground graffiti subculture in early 1979. He considered the subways to be his “laboratory,” a place where he could experiment and where he first created the Radiant Baby icon, a crawling infant with emitting rays of light, his most recognized symbol. In 1980 he began organizing exhibitions at Club 57, with his first solo show at Westbeth Painters Space in the West Village the following year. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, many of them created voluntarily for hospitals, day care centers, and schools. He was one of the first artists to display work on the computer-animated Spectacolor Billboard in Times Square in 1982, and over the next few years participated in national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. In 1986 he opened the Pop Shop as an extension of his work and no longer painted in front of the public, often working extremely quickly to create as much work as possible, sometimes completing as many as 40 paintings in a day. He routinely gave out free pieces of his art to visitors, including buttons and posters. His arrest for the “Crack is Wack” mural in East Harlem in 1986 only increased his fame, and he began to collaborate with celebrities like choreographer Bill T. Jones, the Neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the pop star Madonna. His later work often conveyed political and societal themes, primarily anti-drug, anti-apartheid, safe sex, and pro-homosexuality, developing his own iconography that became associated with social activism. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1987 and AIDS in 1988, passing away from complications on February 16th, 1990, just 31 years old. He was one of the most powerful voices speaking out about the disease in his final years, and is considered instrumental in changing public opinion about the epidemic. There have been countless retrospectives about his work since his death, and the Pop Shop remained open until 2005 with profits benefiting the Keith Haring Foundation to help at-risk youth.

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