Keith Haring "Subway Drawings 1981-82"

Andrew Roth

poster for Keith Haring "Subway Drawings 1981-82"

This event has ended.

“…A drawing would maybe stay up for a week or two weeks and then there’d be a new advertisement or a new black paper put on top of it… There was a constant need to do the next step in the story, so the story started growing like a serial.” - Keith Haring
Those of us who have come to Keith Haring’s drawings from an historical distance may assume that his instantly recognizable glyphs are part of a fixed iconography, as a cryptic communication to be deciphered. But for Haring—and for the commuters who rode the trains in the early ‘80s (and the police who patrolled them)—the drawings were more like episodes, or fragments in a kaleidoscope, and the elements that populated them were always shifting and accumulating and transforming their meanings. The “radiating baby” was not always infantile, nor was the “barking dog” always canine. The latter originated as a generic box-nosed beast. The former began merely as a crawling person, who had been “empowered” by beams from a sombrero-shaped UFO; later, because its head grew in proportion to its body and it was juxtaposed with nuclear symbols, it became a baby whose glow seemed to represent radioactivity. (And the figure with the hole in his chest was forever connected in Haring’s mind with the shooting of John Lennon, although the figure predated that event.)

Media

Schedule

from January 13, 2011 to February 11, 2011

Artist(s)

Keith Haring

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