Keith Haring - Keith Haring Journals

SHEPARD FAIREY

Though Keith Haring died only two years after I started making street art, his art and practice had already had a profound impact on me. Haring demonstrated that one could create art on the street that differed from the more pervasive lettering-based graffiti. He also showed me that the same artists could not only affect people on the streets, they could also put their art on T-shirts and record covers, as well as have their work respected, displayed, and sold as fine art. Inspired by Keith Harings achievements, I pursued my art career with the optimism that my goals could be attained.

Anyone familiar with the career of Keith Haring knows he was a prolific artist with a distinct style that was simultaneously refined and primitive, deliberate yet lyrical and energetic. Clearly he aspired to create art with purity and integrity, but to do so in an accessible way so it could be shared with people. He was also widely known to pursue his art with a deeply personal vision, as a champion of social justice and a believer in the interconnectedness of humanity. The worlds Haring deftly navigated and the barriers he attempted to break down have been extensively noted by art critics.

However, its one thing to see an artists work and hear critical analysis, and another altogether to hear an artists own thoughts, ideas, hopes, fears, questions, and most profound philosophies in his own words. Haring, as viewed through the prism of success, cannot compare to the thoughts revealed in his journals as they follow his evolution as an artist and human being, his rise to fame, and his eventual diagnosis as HIV positive.

One of the many insights Haring shares in his journals is that fame changes peoples perceptions. In 1989, Haring wrote, People keep asking me how success has changed me. I always say that success has changed peoples responses and behavior toward me and that has affected me, but it has not really changed me. I feel the same on the inside as I did 10 years ago. Through Harings journals, one bypasses the detached academic evaluations of his work as art history and finds the artists own documentation and catharsis as he develops his identity and philosophy.

Its nothing short of remarkable how developed and sophisticated Keith Harings worldview was at a very young age. Upon arriving at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1978 at only twenty years old, Haring begins to lay out his ideas about art and life. Harings populism is demonstrated early on, and eventually manifests in many forms. The public has a right to art and Art is for everybody are ideas that can be found in his journals from that time, and remained consistent throughout his career.

Traveling the New York subways, Haring immediately took note of the surrounding visuals. The graffiti and advertising posters seen on and around the subways influenced Haring as not only aesthetic references but also as accessible images in the public right-of-way. He engaged with the pervasive forces of advertising as repetitive and graphically engaging, and graffiti as free-spirited, fluid transgression, sometimes interacting with or commenting on the advertising. Haring illuminated his transition from an observer of these visuals to a participant, adding his own work into the negative area in ads and other spaces of opportunity in the public environment. He discusses his idea of his paintings as visual poems, with hieroglyphics or pictograms open to interpretation by the viewer. His journals provide ample evidence that the visual language he developed was not simply justified by retroactive intellectualization, but evolved from a desire to fulfill a very clear vision.