Learning about another famous gay artist Keith Haring

I have had so much fun learning as I do stuff like this. Searching the web for famous gay artists, poets, writers, etc. This time I chose Keith Haring because his art was so abstract to me, but captivating. Enjoy, I did.


A pure product of pop culture -- punk, New Wave, hip-hop, graffiti and break dance -- Keith Haring belongs to a group of young artists who nourished music and art in New York during the 1980s.
Keith Haring was driven by a fervent desire to communicate. His work -- built from an iconic language of signature lines and symbols -- continues to reach out to the broadest of audiences, dissolving the boundary between fine art and popular culture, between the gallery and the street. his own vocabulary made of very simple figurative signs: hearts, babies, dogs and various silhouettes that take on thousands of different meanings depending on how he put them together. The rest is history.
Biography
May 4, 1958 - February 16, 1990

At the age of twenty-five, Haring had already invented a gripping, universally recognized visual language, accessible as much to neophytes as to connoisseurs. Six years later, he was dead, his blinding fame coinciding with the progression of the disease that killed him in 1990, at the age of thirty-one. Haring never hesitated to become involved in humanitarian causes: the fight against discrimination, drug abuse, illiteracy and AIDS. Knowing that he was HIV-positive,

Keith also organized exhibtions and performed at Club 57, in the basement of a church at 57 Saint Mark's Place. He participated in the Times Square show, an important exhibition of new art held in New York City, and made the first drawings with flying saucers; animals and human images that recur in the subway drawings. Haring wanted to demystify art at any cost and make it universally accessible; this led him to create countless graffiti.The drawings in the Subway were quite simple - pyramids, flying saucers, human figures, winged figures, television sets, animals, and babies. Soon the baby with rays all around it became a kind of signature, and the people of New York who rode the subways began recognizing these drawing, although they had no idea who made them

Click on the title of this post to be taken to his homepage.