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Soon, however, Keith began growing out of his recklessness. He came to realize that drugs and bad company were holding him back. By the time he graduated from high school, in 1976, nothing was going to keep Keith back, and he felt grown-up enough to leave home, leave Kutztown, and look ahead to a future in which art would be his focus.
So in 1976 he moved to Pittsburgh. "When Keith left home I remember standing at the kitchen door just weeping," said Keith's mother. "I was just so relieved that when he left he wasn't the problem he had been earlier. I'll confess it was almost a relief not to have the loud music going all the time. But I missed Keith terribly - just terribly."
Part of Keith's journey toward independence involved coming to terms with the fact that he was gay. Confusing as it had been some years earlier, he gradually became comfortable with this aspect of his life, and with this acceptance came a sense of liberation.
| "I was happy, because I suddenly found that my art was blossoming as was my sexuality, and opportunities seemed at hand. I wasn't sure of any of it, but believed in the fact that whatever was happening was happening for a reason. So I went along with the flow - and I let whatever happened happen." |
Keith attended art school in Pittsburgh - the Ivy School - but switched to another, The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, where he was given his first solo art exhibition of abstract drawings.
In 1978, at the age of 20, Keith decided to go to New York City where he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts as a scholarship student, and where he began to enter the chaotic yet exhilarating stream of the New York art world.
New York in the 1980s was a place where lots and lots of things were always happening. Kids from all over America were coming to the East Village to live and to create. They were a whole new generation taking over from the fast-fading hippie culture. Keith was part of this feverish activity as he immersed himself in the club scene, the punk-rock music scene and especially in the graffiti scene, which was blossoming on the streets and in the subway system of the city.
| "Graffiti were the most beautiful things I ever saw. The kids who were doing it were very young and from the streets, but they had this incredible mastery of drawing which totally blew me away. I mean, just the technique of drawing with spray paint is amazing, because it's incredibly difficult to do. And the fluidity of line, and the scale, and always the hard-edged black line that tied the drawings together! It was the line I had been obsessed with since childhood!" |
All at once, he began to experience a multicultural urban community with its own expressive vocabulary; a lively environment in which to explore his gay identity; and a peer group, at the School of Visual Arts and in the vibrantly experimental East Village, as energetic and uninhibited as Keith himself. He was particularly inspired by the beauty and spontaneity of the graffiti he saw in the subways. Graffiti spoke of a world that was hip and streetwise, creative and spontaneous and underground -- all that he admired and wanted to be. At the same time, he admired the technical mastery and calligraphic quality of the graffiti artists' tags.
| "The public has a right to art... The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses... I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together." |
His classes at SVA (with teachers such as Keith Sonnier, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Buchner, and others) provided Keith with an important critical framework for his emerging style. He began to work obsessively, hanging his drawings in the hallways of the school for everyone to see. He created videotapes and performance pieces, and he also began doing a lot of writing. These experiments were part of his search for a unique style of visual communication.
| "I bought a roll of oak-tag paper and cut it up and put it all over the floor and worked on this whole group of drawings. The first few were abstracts, but then these images started coming. They were humans and animals in different combinations. Then flying saucers were zapping the humans. I remember trying to figure out where this stuff came from, but I have no idea. It just grew into this group of drawings. I was thinking about these images as symbols, as a vocabulary of things. In one a dog's being worshipped by these people. In another one the dog is being zapped by a flying saucer. Suddenly it made sense to draw on the street, because I had something to say." |
He painted on large-scale photo backdrop paper in a street-level studio on Twenty-second Street where he enjoyed the comments of passers-by. He also videotaped the painting process.
| "The School of Visual Arts was great. I took basic foundation classes, which meant classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history. Later, I took course in video art, semiotics, and in performance art. Everything was very exciting - living in Greenwich Village, having my own apartment and going to school. And it was great meeting Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who became my friends and also wanted to become artists." |
All of Keith's teachers at the School of Visual Arts remembered him as being an unusually energetic and dedicated student. Said Jeanne Siegel, the head of the Fine Arts Department, "Right from the beginning the thing that struck me about Keith was that here was a young man who was very directed and very determined. He knew what he wanted to do and then he did it. And he was producing eccentric works as compared to the other students."
All Haring images © Estate Of Keith Haring
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