Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody

On April 27, the Walker Art Center will open Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody, a major exhibition on the life and work of Keith Haring (US, 1958–1990). Haring’s practice, rooted in the notion that “art is for everybody,” aimed to dissolve barriers between art and life. This exhibition—featuring more than 100 artworks from the full arc of the artist’s career—captures his creative ethos and radical vision and explores the ongoing influence of his work on contemporary artistic practice and popular culture. The survey includes significant examples of his paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as rarely seen archival materials lent by the Keith Haring Foundation, including video, photographs, and personal journals. Recognized for his distinctive visual language—conveyed through vibrant color, energetic line work, and iconic characters such as the barking dog and the “radiant baby”—Haring embraced a democratic spirit in his work. This exhibition celebrates the vitality and complexity of his art, which spreads joy while addressing issues that remain urgent today, from capitalism and politics to sexuality and religion. The exhibition will remain on view at the Walker through September 8, 2024.  

Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody is organized by The Broad, Los Angeles, where it debuted in May 2023. The Walker’s presentation is the final stop on a North American tour that also included the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. During his life, Haring had a relationship with the Walker, participating in a 1984 residency at the art center that involved working with local youth. His time in Minneapolis culminated with the creation of a large-scale mural for a concourse that once connected the Walker to the Guthrie Theater. The Walker’s iteration of Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody will be supplemented by a selection of rare video, audio, photographs, and ephemera from the Walker’s archives.  

Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody unfolds across four galleries, examining significant moments and pivots over the course of his career. The presentation begins with works made during Haring’s art student years in the late 1970s, including early drawings showing the development of his visual vocabulary. Also on view are photographs by the artist Tseng Kwong Chi documenting Haring’s drawings made on the fly in the New York subway system. A range of videos throughout the exhibition, such as Painting Myself Into a Corner, 1979, show the artist working with what would become his signature method of rapid drawing and assured mark-making. The second gallery features the artist’s breakout work from the early 1980s, as Haring was becoming known in the art world, and includes large-scale paintings on vinyl tarps, paintings using enamel and Day-Glo paint, and a selection of animations. The third gallery begins with a section called “Party of Life” and is filled with large-scale, exuberant paintings accompanied by rare ephemera, photographs, and video showing Haring’s contributions to the downtown New York scene.  

Haring’s art and activism were intertwined, and the works in the fourth section of the exhibition show his commentary on issues surrounding environmentalism, capitalism, religion, race, and sexuality. In particular, the artists’ activism within the HIV/AIDS crisis led to the creation of powerful, large-scale paintings made before his death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 31.   

The exhibition will also feature a section in the galleries devoted to Haring’s celebrated Pop Shop, which first opened in 1986 in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, carrying artist-designed products that featured his imagery on everything from T-shirts to stickers to skateboards. The exhibition concludes with a section focused on Haring’s lasting impact, featuring a selection of major works that show the artist deploying his range of imagery on a massive scale, a way of working that paralleled his practice of creating public mural projects worldwide. Seen together, the works in the exhibition attest to Haring’s enduring legacy.