Keith Haring (Reading, Pennsylvania, 1958 - New York, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art grew out of the New York graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His importance lies in turning spontaneous drawings into a recognizable visual language and in putting that language at the service of social protest, addressing apartheid, the crack epidemic, homosexuality, safe sex and AIDS.
His first drawings appeared in late 1980 in the New York subway, where he used white chalk to sketch figures on the empty black panels reserved for advertising. He regarded the subway as his laboratory. Barking dogs, dancing figures, flying saucers and a radiant baby, which eventually became his signature, formed a vocabulary that viewers came to recognize. He was arrested several times for damaging public property. His career took a decisive step in 1982, when he had his first solo show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York and took part in documenta 7 in Kassel.
He then moved on to large-scale murals and commissions. Between 1982 and 1989 he produced more than fifty public artworks, many of them made voluntarily for hospitals, nurseries and schools. He also made sculptures that, in his own view, should engage with their setting and invite people to sit on them or climb them. His process was intuitive; by his own account, he made no preliminary sketches. In 1986 he opened the Pop Shop, a store selling products bearing his images to bring his work to a wider public.
His late works addressed political and social themes with growing insistence, and AIDS, the disease that killed him on February 16, 1990, in New York. After his death, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a retrospective of his work in 1997. In 2014 he was one of the inaugural honorees of the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, and in 2019 he was included in the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument in New York. His legacy lies in the way he joined street art, pop and social protest, and in his commitment to making his work accessible.