Keith Haring
| Keith Haring | |
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| Born |
Keith Allen Haring May 4, 1958 Reading, Pennsylvania |
| Died | February 16, 1990 (aged 31) New York City, New York |
| Education | The Ivy School of Professional Art (Pittsburgh) School of Visual Arts (New York) |
| Known for | Pop art, graffiti art |
| Notable work | "Crack is Wack" |
| Movement | AIDS awareness |
| Awards | The Art Award |
| Website | haring |
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s by expressing concepts of birth, death, sexuality, and war.
Haring's work was often heavily political and his imagery has become a widely recognized visual language of the 20th century.
Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother Joan Haring, and father Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen. Haring became interested in art at a very early age spending time with his father producing creative drawings. His early influences included Walt Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and the Looney Tunes characters in The Bugs Bunny Show. In Haring's teenage years, he left his religious background behind and hitchhiked across the country, selling vintage t-shirts and experimenting with drugs. He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art but lost interest in it. He made the decision to leave after having read Robert Henri's The Art Spirit (1923) which inspired him to concentrate on his own art.
Haring had a maintenance job at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and was able to explore the art of Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey. His most critical influences at this time were a 1977 retrospective of the work of Pierre Alechinsky and a lecture by the sculptor Christo in 1978. Alechinsky's work, connected to the international Expressionist group CoBrA, gave Haring confidence to create larger paintings of calligraphic images. Christo introduced him to the possibilities of involving the public with his art. Haring's first important one-man exhibition was in Pittsburgh at the Center for the Arts in 1978.
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