Art Review - Keith Haring in Toronto

"Art Is For Everybody" at the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Trump Administration’s disastrous policy of denial regarding COVID was an echo of the Reagan Administration’s catastrophic response to the AIDS pandemic that began in the 1980s and has taken 40 million lives. As in the video below the death of gay men, the community in which AIDS first emerged in the 1980s, was an adolescent punchline to President Reagan rather than a public health crisis.

It was in this world of contempt and indifference that Keith Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31, produced his art and became a public figure. The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto is currently exhibiting a Keith Haring survey, Art is For Everybody.

Due to the AGO’s small footprint, the Toronto Haring exhibit is attenuated and doesn’t contain the 120 items displayed at the original Los Angeles exhibition. I would note that the AGO has plans to expand by 40,000 feet in the next several years making it larger than its American cousin, New York’s Whitney.

A sample of paintings from the AGO Exhibit. All images owned and © by the Keith Haring Foundation

Haring began his career in New York after studying at the School of Visual Arts and gained renown as a graffiti artist, filling public spaces with art related to Gay Rights and commenting on the public indifference to the growing AIDS crisis.

Although grouped with other artists in the “Pop Art” category such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Christo, Haring’s style was unique. Haring’s paintings feature stylized humans shapes, fluid lines, and warm, bright colors.

The male phallus is a primary theme in Haring’s work. One need allow the eye to dwell on a canvas for a few extra moments before the painting is revealed to be a kind of palimpsest; what at first appears to be a compelling abstraction of fluid lines and figures gives way to clear homoerotic, phallic images. Indeed, my companion and I enjoyed a rousing game of “find the penis” as we took a second lap.

An unlikely celebrity in the vapid Reagan Era, Haring used the attention to make the world a better place by protesting apartheid in South Africa and calling for nuclear disarmament. Art is For Everybody is a compelling exhibition not only as an art retrospective but as blunt commentary about our pathological inability to deal with the world in all its wild, colorful diversity.

Art is for Everybody remains on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario until March 17, 2024. It travels to the Walker Center in Minneapolis and is on exhibit at the Walker Center from April 27 to September 8, 2024.