October 8 is Last Chance to Catch ‘Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody’ at The Broad

The Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody exhibition at The Broad is ending on Saturday, October 8. This is the last chance to see The Broad’s first-ever museum exhibition in Los Angeles displaying Keith Haring’s expansive body of work with over 120 artworks and archival materials.

The exhibition includes a sculpture that was part of an Art on The Outside exhibition in West Hollywood in 1998. Ten Keith Haring sculptures were on display at the median along Santa Monica Boulevard. Check them out here.

Also on display is the hand painted leather skirt and jacket that Madonna wore at the Paradise Garage for Keith Haring’s birth on May 16, 1984. The exhibition includes video footage of Madonna performing Dress You Up for the very first time.

Keith Haring is known for his use of vibrant color, energetic linework and iconic characters like the barking dog and the radiant baby, Haring’s work continues to dissolve barriers between art and life and spread joy, all while being rooted in the creative spirit and mission of his subway drawings and renowned public murals: art is for everybody. Curated by Broad curator and exhibition manager Sarah Loyer, the exhibition explores both Haring’s artistic practice and life, with much of the source material for the exhibition coming from his personal journals.

Divided into ten galleries in total, the expansive exhibition features the breadth of mediums Haring worked within, including video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and graphic works, as well as representations from the artist’s enormous output of public projects, from the subway drawings to his public murals. Works presented span from the late-1970s when he was a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York up until 1988, just two years before the artist died from AIDS-related illness at the age of 31. Haring’s participation in nuclear disarmament and anti-Apartheid movements are featured prominently in the show, as well as works that take on complex issues that remain crucial today from environmentalism, capitalism, and the proliferation of new technologies to religion, sexuality, and race. In the last gallery, significant works from the late 1980s are accompanied by framed posters illustrating the artist’s activism within the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Major works held in The Broad collection such as Untitled, 1984 and Red Room, 1988 are on view in addition to key loans from many institutional and private collections, including art, ephemera and documentation provided by the Keith Haring Foundation in New York, established by the artist in 1989. The show features immersive elements, such as a gallery lit by blacklight soundtracked by playlists created by the artist himself. Additionally, the Shop at The Broad has been transformed, taking inspiration from Haring’s artistic retail space The Pop Shop, which first opened in 1986 in the SoHo neighborhood of New York.

Following its debut at The Broad, Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, from November 11, 2023 to March 17, 2024, and to the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, from April 27 to September 8, 2024.