This is just a short page about Keith Haring's beginnings, up to the point when he started working in the subway. If you want to learn more, just go to www.haring.com .
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Keith was born to Joan and Allen Haring on May 4, 1958. He grew up in Kutztown,
Pennsylvania, the oldest of four siblings. His artistic leanings were evident
from a very early age. My father made cartoons. Since I was little, I had
been doing cartoons, creating characters and stories. In my mind, though,
there was a separation between cartooning and being an "artist"...
Art continued
to be a central interest throughout Keith's experimental and rather rebellious
adolescence. Through books and museum visits (Keith saw his first Warhols
on a church visit to the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C.) he began to develop
an awareness of modern art. After high school, Keith enrolled in the Ivy
School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh.
I'd been convinced to go [to art school] by my parents and guidance counselor. They said that if I was going to seriously pursue being an artist, I should have some commercial-art background. I went to a commercial-art school, where I quickly realized that I didn't want to be an illustrator or a graphic designer. The people I met who were doing it seemed really unhappy; they said that they were only doing it for a job while they did their own art on the side, but in reality that was never the case--their own art was lost. I quit the school
In 1976, Keith
hitchhiked cross-country, stopping along the way to look at other art programs.
When he returned to Pittsburgh later that year, he sat in on classes at
the University of Pittsburgh, and eventually became involved with the Pittsburgh
Arts and Crafts Center, where he had his first important show.
Elements
that would become central to Keith's style were beginning to emerge; he
began working with a vocabulary of small, interconnected abstract shapes.
At the same time, he began to discover some of his most important influences
among modern artists.
See no Evil 
...I went to a huge retrospective by Pierre Alechinsky at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It was the first time that I had seen someone who was older and established doing something that was vaguely similar to my little abstract drawings. It gave me this whole new boost of confidence. ..
...I used the library at Carnegie all the time. I was reading a lot. I was really into Dubuffet at the time... the last works that he did were very similar to the little shaped things I was doing....
...And that was the time that I started doing the really big things. I think I was taking the cue from Alechinsky and saying I can do these same things, but I can do them with ink, and I can do them big. I didn't have to worry about what it was, it was completely spontaneous. But still somehow about the patterns and the shapes...
...I saw Christo talk around the same time, and it was right after he had done the Running Fence [1972-1976]. That was another thing that had the most profound effect on me...the event as public art takes it into another arena besides object-making...
...The thing I responded to most was [Christo's] belief that art could reach all kinds of people, as opposed to the traditional view, which has art as this elitist thing...
Keith was excited enough about finding his artistic role models and about showing his work in Pittsburgh to start to consider his next steps as an artist.
...When someone canceled
an exhibition [at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center] and they had an
empty space, the director offered me an exhibit in one of the galleries.
For Pittsburgh, this was a big thing, especially for me, being nineteen
and showing in the best place I could show in Pittsburgh besides
the museum. From that time, I knew I wasn't going to be satisfied with
Pittsburgh anymore or the life I was living there. I had started sleeping
with men...I decided to make a major break.
New York was the only place
to go..
One day, riding the subway, I saw this empty black panel where an advertisement was supposed to go. I immediately realized that this was the perfect place to draw. I went back above ground to a card shop and bought a box of white chalk, went back down and did a drawing on it. It was perfect--soft black paper; chalk drew on it really easily.
I kept seeing more and more of these black spaces, and I drew on them whenever I saw one. Because they were so fragile, people left them alone and respected them; they didn't rub them out or try to mess them up. It gave them this other power. It was this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. People were completely enthralled.
I was
always totally amazed that the people I would meet while I was doing them
were really, really concerned with what they meant. The first thing anyone
asked me, no matter how old, no matter who they were, was what does it
mean?
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