Keith Haring

Take the industrial-sized elevator to the fourth floor. Long rolls of paper covered in UFOs, nuclear power plants, and protest imagery charged with Cold War dread in physical form. These drawings were first shown around the corner at PS 122, when nobody outside the neighborhood knew Keith Haring’s name.

Head down to the third floor, where a handful of subway drawings are mounted in their original MTA frames – one still next to an ad for Penthouse magazine. They ring a giant Greek urn crawling with his iconography. You can see Haring’s iconography solidify in real time

The second floor opens into a room so tall it feels like the nave of a cathedral. Tarp paintings fill it – radiant babies, bodies, and Christian iconography tangled up with pop energy. Behind them, a fluorescent dancing dog surrounded by bebop boys anchors the room and signals that this was the moment when hip hop, art, and nightlife converged downtown.

What you’re visiting in this exhibition is a brief, electric window: 1980 to 1983. Early Reagan, pre-AIDS, and a city so bombed out that anything felt possible. It’s a New York myth, but between these walls, it feels briefly, improbably alive.

Keith Haring (b. May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania; d. February 16, 1990, New York City) moved to Manhattan in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts. His father, a hobbyist cartoonist who loved Disney and Mickey Mouse, taught him to draw. He began making art in the subway in 1980, which propelled him into the public eye. A few years later, he was one of the most recognizable artists in the world. He died in 1990, aged 31, from AIDS-related complications. He left behind more than most people do in a longer lifetime.