Walker Art Center debuts major exhibition by 1980s art star Keith Haring

It was 1982, and 24-year-old artist Keith Haring was being handcuffed and escorted out of the New York City subway, where he’d been drawing cartoonish chalk figures on the walls before ads could be put up over them. This was his routine, creating as many as 30 drawings a day, each taking only a minute or so to complete. His style was fast-paced and very pop culture, and his art wasn’t for the art world elite. It was — and still is — for everyone.

“You don’t have to know anything about art to appreciate it,” Haring told a CBS reporter in 1982. “There aren’t any hidden secrets or things you’re supposed to understand.”

Haring’s drawings are still omnipresent. Many will recognize his depictions of cartoonish crawling babies, gender-ambiguous characters entwined with one another, and various intensely zigzag-y patterned paintings. An exhibition of his work, “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody,” organized by the Broad Art Foundation in L.A. and now on view at the Walker Art Center, includes more than 100 works and rarely seen archival materials.

There’s also a special section focused on his 1984 residency at the Walker Art Center organized by then-curator Adam Weinberg, now former executive director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Keith Haring embraced a democratic spirit in his work, aiming to dissolve the barriers between art and life,” Walker Executive Director Mary Ceruti said.

Haring’s work was intrinsically political, centering on topics including environmentalism, capitalism, religion, race and sexuality. It was the 1980s, and he participated in the nuclear disarmament movement and anti-apartheid movements and was a vocal activist during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Haring, who was gay at a time long before the commercialized Pride parades of today, moved to New York City in 1978 from Kutztown, Pa., to attend the School of the Visual Arts. The exhibition includes his student drawings, like abstract shapes, penises, flying saucers and the popular crawling babies.

For this show, the Walker re-created the mural he made when he was an artist in residence, and it can be seen at the museum’s Cardamom Restaurant. His public art continues on today, from a mural at an Iowa elementary school to a crimson red anti-crack mural in East Harlem that he made in 1986.

The show at the Walker also includes work for his 1982 solo exhibition at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery, which put the young artist on the map. He showed baked enamel on metal paintings of wildly grinning cartoonish faces with two or three eyes, zigzag-y figurines on steel and creatures that feel alive with alien spaceship vibes.

Haring’s then-teen sister Kristen, now 54, remembered being at that 1982 Shafrazi Gallery opening and watching her brother, 12 years her senior, rise to fame.

Kristen made the trip to Minneapolis for last week’s opening at the Walker in part because her brother had been here.

“[In 1984] it was a very early instance of a U.S. institution bringing him in and respecting him as an artist and enjoying a program where he could work with kids but also doing murals and things like this,” Kristen Haring said.

Weinberg remembered Haring working with elementary school students to produce sets and costumes for the Walker’s 1984 ArtFest Celebration, which the Walker will re-create as a three-day fest starting May 30.

“Keith’s quiet, focused, single-minded demeanor belied his boundless energy, accessibility and marvelous magnetism,” Weinberg said. “He was a Pied Piper. He loved working with young people; he made a drawing for each of the participating students as gifts.”

Although Haring is also remembered for his LGBTQ activism, it was a different time in the ‘80s, and he wasn’t publicly out his entire career.

“I think it was AIDS that really made him say, ‘OK, I don’t care what people say, I am going to speak publicly,’” Kristin Haring said. “Forty years ago it was a different time. Things are very difficult now, but it was harder then, especially because he loved working with children and people were so nasty about the fact that he wanted to do these projects with kids, but it was just his heart. He had a wonderful dynamic with children, and he was always drawing with them and for them, to entertain them.”

Haring befriended the likes of Andy Warhol, Madonna, Grace Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other influencers in NYC. Polaroid photos of Haring and all these people also are in the show.

Haring died of AIDS-related complications at age 31, and the last room of the exhibition shows works made from that era, including his very last work, “Unfinished Painting,” 1989, that he purposefully left unfinished, although online AI has finished it, raising more ethical questions about the ability of AI to complete a painting that was never meant to be completed.

Nonetheless, Haring’s works live on. He made so many, and they were, and luckily continue to be, everywhere.

“They come out fast,” Haring said in the CBS interview. “It’s a fast world.”

When: Ends Sept. 8.

Where: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls.

Info: walkerart.org or 612-375-7600.

Cost: $2-$18.

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed., Fri.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thu.