His “radiant boy” and famous “barking dog” are now recognized around the world, developing as a truly universal language that affects the minds and hearts of everyone, no one excluded. Art Is For Everybody celebrates Keith Haring with a journey of discovery of his most and least known works, with the intention of fulfilling the great artist’s wish: to create art that can speak to anyone, art that is as profound in its simplicity as it is in its complexity. Its thick, decisive line and bright colors give life to imaginary, childlike characters, protagonists of deep and meaningful, yet easily understood stories, creating an unbreakable bond between work and viewer. The minimalist nature of the works makes it possible to quickly attract attention, understand the figures, and then focus on the deeper content that invites reflection on important social issues. Heavily influenced by street art, his early drawings are murals around New York City, developing a language rich in signs and symbols, easily accessible to the pleasing public who walking or taking the subway would find themselves in front of a Haring work. The artist destroys every boundary, every barrier between people and galleries, showing everyone how art can directly reach people’s daily lives. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles aims to explore the artistic practice of the graffiti genius, bringing the public closer to his life and the deeper meaning of the works.
“The audience will have the opportunity to dive deep into Haring’s work, both as an artist and as in innovator who completely shifted the landscape of contemporary art.”
Keith Haring’s visual language celebrates solidarity, joy, community, and hope: his drawings originated as an act of awareness about social and political issues, against nuclear war and racial discrimination, to inform the general public about AIDS, and emphasizing the importance of education about sexually transmitted diseases. The exhibition features works produced from the late 1970s through to some paintings from just two years before his death, crucial to understanding his ideas about religion, gender and race. The journey allows visitors to discover every artistic medium Keith Haring used, including video, sculpture, drawing, painting and graphic design, a large collection of his most significant works from the street, private collections and the Keith Haring Foundation. The audience is totally immersed in the visual story of the characters, able to completely surrender to the image while a playlist created by the artist himself plays in the background in the room.
Throughout his life he worked to fulfill his greatest dream, to make a work that could reach the masses, and not a small bourgeois audience: he felt responsible for making himself a spokesman for a message. The dogs are one of the most famous images, first appearing in the series of drawings made in the subway in the early 1980s. It starts as a mythical, nonexistent creature that later transformed into the most common animal in the whole world, the dog: the representation of abuses of power, of government, of oppressive regimes that demand obedience. The “radiant boy,” on the other hand, could be defined as the eternal child of art. Portrayed as a figure in the act of crawling, surrounded by rays radiating outward, he describes the inner child in each of us, free and full of life, a symbol of divine grace. Nowadays Keith Haring could feel accomplished, because his stylized little men and seemingly simple images have reached, and continue to reach, everyone, truly proving that “art is for everybody.”
