Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody

Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody explores the distinctive quality and enduring influence of Keith Haring’s life and art, through more than 100 works and rarely seen archival materials. Haring’s unique visual language—now broadly recognizable in popular culture—continues to resonate for its prescient address of social issues and its celebration of joy, solidarity, community, and hope.

Spanning the full arc of the artist’s career, the exhibition features a wide range of works, including major paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mural-scaled works featuring Haring’s emblematic characters, such as dancing figures, barking dogs, and crawling babies. It also includes video, photographs, ephemera, and important source material from the artist’s personal journals. A section of the exhibition highlights the immersive environment of his celebrated Pop Shop, an artist-designed store that featured his imagery on a variety of everyday products, from T-shirts to skateboards. Also included in the exhibition is material highlighting the artist’s 1984 residency at the Walker Art Center.

Haring embraced a democratic spirit in his work, aiming to dissolve barriers between art and life. His practice was rooted in the notion that “art is for everybody,” a creative ethos and mission he carried from his early drawings in New York’s subway stations to his renowned public murals. The artist’s art and passionate activism were intertwined, and works in the exhibition show his commentary on issues surrounding environmentalism, capitalism, religion, race, and sexuality. In particular, the artist’s participation in the nuclear disarmament and anti-Apartheid movements, and his activism within the HIV/AIDS crisis led to significant works.

A major catalogue accompanies the exhibition, available in the Museum Shop and published by The Broad in collaboration with DelMonico Books. The book features texts by exhibition curator Sarah Loyer, and writers Kimberly Drew and Tom Finkelpearl; a roundtable conversation between performer Patti Astor and artists Kenny Scharf and Kermit Oswald; and reflections by select contemporaries of Haring’s including George Condo, Ann Magnuson, Bill T. Jones, Julia Gruen, Tony Shafrazi, and Gil Vazquez.

Access our free digital guide to the exhibition on the free Bloomberg Connects app.