![]() He also created a number of street art pieces designed to shine a light on the issue too. Over the remaining years of his life, he spoke widely about the illness in an attempt to raise awareness and help others. Following this, he established the Keith Haring Foundation which aimed to raise funding for AIDS organizations and research programs. Haring also participated in prestigious national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. He did these mainly to raise awareness of health issues, charities, hospitals, and children’s needs. Over the course of the 1980s, he created over 50 artworks in the form of street art and graffiti art in several cities around the world. Haring was interested in spending much of his artistic career on public works – most of which conveyed social and political messages. Notably, the artist’s clothing began to appear on consumers around the streets gaining him even more popularity. In 1986, the artist opened his Pop Shop, a store in Soho where he sold everything from T-shirts to toys, posters, and buttons, all using his own images an attempt to make his work widely accessible that many criticized, accusing Haring of commercializing his work. He started exhibiting his work across cities in America and further afield. The 1980s were Haring’s successful decade. Soon hundreds of his “subway drawings”, realized in chalk against the black surfaces of the unused advertising spaces paper, started to populate the subway system on a daily basis and became familiar to the commuters. The drawings would eventually be covered with new ads, in one of the most legendary and ephemeral art projects, one that would gain Haring him significant attention in the art world and beyond. Convinced of the public nature of art as something for everyone to enjoy – not simply those attending galleries and museums – he found his laboratory in the subway and his audience in the New York commuters, and his canvas in the empty subway advertising spaces covered with black paper. This led Haring to begin work on his own style. He met musicians and graffiti writers and fellow artists that would deeply influence his work, from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf to Andy Warhol and Christo. It was here that he found got involved with local communities of artists who enjoyed creating art outside of conventional practices, participating in exhibitions in iconic underground venues such as Club 57. Later, he moved to New York and joined the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In 1978, he held his first solo exhibition of work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center. Yet, the budding artist didn’t want to become a commercial graphic artist, so decided to drop out and continued to develop his own artistic skills in Pittsburgh. He attended a local high school and after graduating he went to the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh. He began by learning basic drawing skills from his father and forms of popular culture – most notably Dr. Born in Pennsylvania in 1958, Keith Haring’s talent for art shone through at a young age. ![]()
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