Interview: Curator Dieter Buchhart and Allison Brant On Keith Haring

Last week, the Brant Foundation opened “Keith Haring,” an exhibit in their East Village location that explores the artist’s early years in New York City. The exhibition includes works made between 1980 and 1983, a pivotal period in Haring’s life that saw him go from graffiti prankster to gallery darling. We met with the program’s co-curator Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Brant Foundation director Allison Brant (daughter of billionaire industrialist and collector Peter Brant) to hear more about this temporary exhibition.

The show focuses on the early years of Keith Haring’s career, roughly 1980-1983. What makes this brief period such a compelling lens through which to revisit Haring today?

Dr. Dieter Buchhart: These years contain the time when all of Haring’s visual language came into being. Between 1980 and 1983, one can see him inventing, combining, testing and sharpening a pictorial vocabulary that later became universal: the glowing child, the barking dog, the activated body, the radiant line, the theatrical silhouette, the hieroglyph-like compression of complex symbols. For us, this is the most exciting entry point because it is the phase where the work is still very open, experimental and connected to the city as a living workplace.

Allison Brant: And it’s time before Haring is reformed into a lighter public image. Today, many people think they already know him, but if you go back to the early years, you rediscover how daring, unstable and searching this work was. The subway paintings, the first canvases, the light paintings and the first large-scale exhibitions show the artist who did not repeat a formula but created a language in real time. That makes the time feel incredibly contemporary too, because we’re talking about how images circulate, how symbols are read and how social code can evolve almost overnight.

Haring’s work moved from the train to the gallery very quickly. The exhibition includes important works from important historical exhibitions such as Tony Shafrazi’s gallery exhibition and the launch of FUN Gallery. Why were those shows important, and how did they come to be in art at that time?

DB: Tony Shafrazi’s 1982 exhibition was important because it made it clear that Haring was not just a street talent, but a fully formed artist capable of transforming a gallery into an immersive space. The Blacklight Room was very important for that: it was not just an exhibition of paintings, but an installation of an atmosphere, almost perfect where fluorescent color, music, body movement and painting came together. It showed that Haring can translate the power of the road into a new spatial experience without losing its urgency.

AKH: The FUN Gallery exhibition of 1983 was important in a different but equally important way. FUN was based in the East Village and in a small, dangerous, mixed environment where art, club culture, music, acting and painting were in constant exchange. Haring’s presence there confirmed that he was never part of a gallery-sanctioned world. He moved between different communities. At that time, these exhibitions came with great force because they challenged the categories inherited: the line between the subway and the gallery, between the so-called high art and popular culture, between urban exploration and market visibility, suddenly opened up.

Are there any works in this exhibition that you feel offer some insight into the beauty of this important early period of his career?

AKH: Several works are particularly revealing because they show that Haring quickly reached a remarkable level of visual obscurity. The 1981 smiley face in baked enamel is another such work for me. It seems irreverently simple, but it just shows his ability to create an image that is quickly readable but not completely readable. It oscillates between humor, symbols, material and the pure charge of the image.

DB: For me, the works connected to the Blacklight Room are equally decisive because they reveal the expanded aesthetic field of Haring’s original. It turns out that his line wasn’t just graphic; it was location, performance and environment. The early barking dogs and Mickey Mouse variations are also important, because they show how he could take an image from cartoons or larger culture and revive it with rhythm, repetition and context. In Haring, meaning is not fixed. A sign behaves differently depending on what is around us. That semiotic instability is one of the deepest qualities of early work.

Catch often equates gaming images with pressing political concerns—from the AIDS crisis to drug culture. We live in an age where artists are encouraged, or even assumed, to be politically positive in everything they do. To what extent did Haring serve as an example of this kind of fusion of art and activism?

DB: Haring is an important model, but not because he turned art into an icon or a slogan. What makes him exemplary is that the politics in his work are centered on the line itself: the political line. He understood that visual language can be attractive and strong, playful and shocking. His images are open enough to invite broad identification, yet precise enough to carry critiques of racism, authoritarianism, the nuclear threat, homophobia, drug addiction and later the ravages of AIDS. He did not separate ethics from aesthetics.

AKH: What is important today is that Haring never used activism as a cultural ornament. He spoke with urgency because he believed that images could enter everyday life and reach people outside the discourse of high art. That is why posters, street interventions, public paintings and later the Pop Shop were all important to him. In that sense, he perfectly symbolizes the current expectations that artists engage with the world. He also reminds us that political art must always be formally persuasive; otherwise, it loses its durability. Haring’s success is that his personality is inseparable from the vitality of his line.

What would you say have been the biggest changes in the East Village since Haring’s time, and how does your show respond to them?

AKH: The early years of the East Village of Haring were dangerous, rough, different and economically accessible in a way that made exploration possible. It wasn’t romantic; it was difficult, and sometimes violent. But because rents were low and social boundaries were unstable, artists, musicians, writers, club figures, immigrants and activists could coexist in a cultural environment. Much of that has changed. The area is deeply built up due to gentrification, technology and real estate pressure.

DB: Our exhibition responds by returning Haring’s work to the place where that language first emerged. We wanted the show not to work as nostalgia, but as a kind of historical revival. Bringing these works back to the East Village allows viewers to see that this art came from very specific urban forces: from public space, speed, danger, society and conflict. It is also a reminder that cultural innovation is always connected to the physical conditions that allow it to happen.

A press release likened Haring’s iconic image to “the spirit of today’s Emoji frenzy.” Can you expand on that idea?

DB: What we are saying is that Haring understood earlier than most artists that modern life is too dependent on compressed, fast-moving visual signals. His images function almost like emotional and social shorthand: they are instantly catchy, easily reproduced and able to travel across linguistic boundaries. In that sense, they expect a world where communication is often graphic, accelerated and integrated. He created a universal language.

AKH: But the comparison should not diminish the work. Haring’s symbols are richer than emojis because they are neither neutral nor focused. A radiant child can represent life, hope, vulnerability, power or an almost cosmic beginning; a dog can be happy, aggressive, protective, authoritative or irrational depending on the context. This is why the concept of letters and the concept of a universal language are so useful. Haring created a visual dictionary, but where syntax and context constantly change meaning. He anticipated the logic of picture-based communication while also exposing its instability.

To me one of his greatest lasting legacies revolves around his embrace of retail through his Pop Shop. Should we blame Haring for the fact that people believe the KAWS t-shirt is a real work of art?

AKH: No, I would be very careful with that ending. Haring did not open the Pop Shop to ironically erase the distinction between works of art and merchandise. He did it because he wanted to reach out. He understood that since his paintings were expensive, the audience he had built around his subway paintings could easily be alienated. So the Pop Shop was an attempt to preserve the democratic impulse in the world of fast-selling art.

DB: Of course. Haring’s act was not merely commercial; it was a continuation of his social work in other ways. One must look at the purpose, ethics and historical context. He wanted children, youth and people without access to the gallery system to live with his image. That is very different from the concept of luxury written only in name. Indeed, modern culture has adapted to the commercialization of artists in ways that may seem superficial. But Haring should not be blamed for that. If anything, you’ve set a more demanding standard: accessibility without sacrificing artistic integrity.

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