H A R I N G

Rolling Stone: What made you want to be an artist?

Keith Haring: “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 a quote-unquote artist. When I made the decision to be an artist, I began doing these completely abstract things that were as far away from cartooning as you could go. It was around the time that I was taking hallucinogens – when I was sixteen or so. Psychedelic shapes would come like automatic writing, come out of my unconscious. The drawings were abstract, but you’d see things in them.”

Keith Haring photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi Bordeaux, France, 1985

“…at the height of his fame in 1989, Haring attacked the prejudice surrounding the growing AIDS crisis with his painting Silence = Death, which features figures covering their eyes and ears and a pink triangle (the badge gay men were forced to wear in the Nazi death camps, and appropriated in the 70s and 80s as a symbol of gay pride).”

Silence = Death, 1989

Keith Haring