Keith Haring Biography (1958 - 1990) Keith Allen Haring was born on May 4th, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania. But the Harings lived in Kutztown, a nearby Pennsylvania Dutch farm community, where Keith was raised. In time, Keith became "big brother" to three sisters, Kay, Karen, and Kristen. The family lived a sheltered small-town life, with Keith’s father working as a supervisor in a communications firm located in Allentown, and with his mother raising the children. "Before Keith was even a year old," recalled Keith’s mother, Joan, "he used to sit on his dad’s lap after supper just drawing some gobbly-goo with crayons he’d been given. Then, later, his father, who was very good at drawing cartoon things, would show Keith how to draw circles. Then, he’d make a circle into a balloon or an ice-cream cone or make a face out of it, and put ears on it or make all kinds of animals. And that’s how it all started." From the first, Keith’s art teachers in Kutztown were astonished at the boy’s obsessive love of drawing. Said one, "With him it was an inborn thing." Another said, "Keith loved line. Anything that lent itself to line pattern, he loved. He worked so intricately! The way the pattern would carry through and around and in and out was just extraordinary. He had such imagination!" In high school, Keith knew he wanted to become an artist. Although he loved the cartoon characters of Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, and Charles Schultz (especially Charlie Brown), he now wanted to do abstract drawings. He started making little shapes that together would fill whole areas, with one shape leading into another shape, and with a line that seemed to flow endlessly - that could go on and on. During a church trip to Washington, D.C., Keith visited the Hirshhorn Museum and there he saw a group of Marilyn Monroes by pop artist Andy Warhol. He was struck by the strong flat images and looked at them for a long, long time. Throughout his whole high school period he looked at art and studied art, because he knew that art would be his life. Keith Haring graduated from Kutztown Area Senior High School in 1976 and spent some time travelling across America before studying at the Art Centre in Pittsburgh. Keith attended art school in Pittsburgh - the Ivy School - but switched to another, The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, where he was given his first solo art exhibition. In 1978, at the age of 20, Keith decided to go to New York City where he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, and where he began to enter the chaotic yet exhilarating stream of the New York art world. "The School of Visual Arts was great," said Keith. "I took basic foundation classes, which meant classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history. Later, I took course in video art, semiotics, and in performance art. Everything was very exciting - living in Greenwich Village, having my own apartment and going to school. And it was great meeting Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who became my friends and also wanted to become artists." At the height of the Punk Rock movement in the late 1970s he participated in the lively New York club scene, working with such street artists as ‘Samo’ (Jean-Michel Basquiat, b 1960). In the summer of 1980 he took up drawing, inventing intricate cartoon-style murals of mutant figures locked in hyper-physical engagement. He was a meteoric star in American art during the 1980s, exhibiting and working on projects throughout the USA, Europe and Asia, and his work became a symbol of the tribal undercurrents that permeate metropolitan life. His accessible imagery stems as much from Islamic and Japanese art as the sign language of contemporary culture. In 1986 the artist opened his own retail outlet, The Pop Shop, in New York and was continuously engaged in projects of an extraordinarily diverse nature, from murals on the Berlin Wall to paintings on hot air balloons, motor cars and decorative accessories. A giant ‘spectacolour’ billboard broadcast his famous Radiant Child image in Times Square, first in 1982. He fell victim to the AIDS epidemic in 1988 and died at the age of 31.

KEITH HARING POSTER SHOP