Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's new 114,000-square-foot expansion is now open. Part of that expansion, a new temporary gallery. And first up in that gallery, "Keith Haring in 3D." Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis got an up-close look.
Do any research on the 1980s street artist turned worldwide phenomenon Keith Haring, and you'll likely find three recurring themes: simplicity, accessibility and activism. Those three principles made up the man and his art, and now curators at Crystal Bridges have created an experience in a new space that holds true to those ideals and allows the public an intimate view of it all. Keith Haring in 3D runs through Jan. 25, 2027.
The exhibit explores a sector of Haring's art that typically receives less attention: his sculptures.
"So you have to remember that when he first started out, he was a kid."
That's guest curator Glenn Adamson. He's a Brooklyn-based writer and curator who helped assemble this inventory of objects that Haring splashed with his iconic shapes and colors. Adamson explains that while the artist became famous for his subway drawings, this was a product of available resources.
"He was just in his early 20s, had come from the Pittsburgh area to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts, and he literally couldn't afford canvases. So he was just grabbing anything he could get his hands on and painting it. And that could be anything from a baby crib to the crushed hood of a taxicab that had been in an accident, little pieces of ceramic and vases. And really, he was trying to fill the whole world with his creativity. And that's really what the ethos of the whole exhibition is."
It shows how he tried to reach the public as much as he could. Now, through the exhibit, the public can reach into Haring's life by closely observing his personal effects.
"Alongside his sculptures, they have his paint brushes, Nike high tops, even his eyeglasses. You get a sense of who he was and how he came to create such art."
And Adamson says the city shaped the artist.
"This is New York City in — what — he arrives in 1978. So hip-hop is just happening.
"Graffiti is everywhere, especially on the subway cars, and he was absolutely blown away by that. So the creativity of it, the way that it filled the whole city with color and life and expressions of identity — exactly the sort of thing that the authorities were frowning upon, he totally embraced.
"And I guess it's important to say that as a white suburban kid, he was very interested in the Black and Latino communities there, but he also respected their difference and saw that what they had generated in this street art was its own distinct form. So one way of thinking about it is that he's trying to take the energy of graffiti and bring it into the art gallery."
He got his rise by running from subway station to subway station, drawing on unused ad spaces that agencies covered in black paper when not in use.
"And he would run into the subway with a piece of chalk and just rapidly make these brilliant drawings and never sign them. So actually, people didn't know who had done this, and he was like a phantom going around the city. He did get arrested on at least one occasion, but generally speaking, he was just running from one station to another. He might do 20 or 30 in a single day, and he's thought to have made about 5,000 of them over the course of his period of subway drawing.
“So that would be the early '80s. And he really thought of them as a kind of — it was almost like a kind of performance art. It was through this practice that he really developed his iconography that we all know, like the babies and the dogs and the flying saucers and the pyramids. All of that appears in his subway drawings. He really thought of them as site specific, and most of them don't survive. We do have one here in the exhibition, but most of them only are known to us through photographs."
Chances are you've seen the art: stick figure-like people dancing, dogs barking, and general movement drawn with big fat lines and flat colors. His 2D art is everywhere, on T-shirts, phone cases, mugs, anything you can put an image onto. However, his sculptures are less ubiquitous. Most of Haring's 3D art is intrinsically tied to its original location, so curators had to think up a way to bring those sites, like a studio or a nightclub, to the gallery. Thankfully, Adamson says the gallery space lent itself to an immersive experience.
"I had the chance to visit this gallery, which of course is brand new, part of the expansion of Crystal Bridges, about a year ago. So I had my hard hat on and walked into the space, and I just was amazed. Took my breath away. Beautiful light filtering down from the ceiling, an incredible rush of space with this one long curved wall — just so beautiful. And I really wanted to give that same experience to our visitors.
"We were very inspired by something Haring had said about his public sculptures. He thought of them as being like a playground for adults, and that's really the ethos of the installation, so people can really wander around in any direction. It's not like a maze where you have to walk through in a certain sequence. It's very open, just for people to explore."
Travis: Do you feel like you achieved that? A playground for adults?
"It definitely feels like that to me. Obviously that's 99% Haring. I always say, if you can't make a good exhibition out of Keith Haring's work, you shouldn't be a curator, because he does it all for you — the pop energy, the color, the irresistible quality of his line, and just the way he filled the world with energy. And we have a lot of his work here. There's probably about 200 works in the show. So there's just so much to look at. So many of them are incredibly detailed, so you could spend days in this show just looking at what he did."
One of Haring's favorite playgrounds in his adult life was the nightclub, and Crystal Bridges co-curator Victor Gomez says Haring's experiences in those venues shaped his art. He loved music. He also loved people. Many of Haring's collaborations are on display, such as in the Day-Glo room, where curators reimagined a club scene and highlighted the artist's work alongside graffiti artist Angel Ortiz, or LA II. Haring used neon Day-Glo paints and LA II's intricate line work to add intensity to an already bustling scene.
"In those spaces, they would use Day-Glo as a way of sort of accentuating the space, and Haring adapted that into his practice, taking these sort of ready-made objects like these busts and painting over them with this fluorescent sort of paint. Under the sort of UV lighting, it has this really glowing effect. And here we sort of try to replicate what he would have done in the 1982 Tony Shafrazi exhibition, where he had a Day-Glo environment. Both of these columns were actually part of that exhibition. That painting was part of that exhibition as well. And then these busts, or again, collaborative pieces with Angel Ortiz, who would have been that graffiti artist."
Gomez says this is an accurate yet bite-sized recreation of the '80s club scene, even with the music.
"Like, these are tracks that his partner Juan Dubose would have pulled together for Haring, in mixtapes, and these are things he would have heard in the clubs. These are songs that he would have been listening to in the studio as he was working. And so this was very much inspired by, again, his life in New York City. The sort of distinction between life, nightlife, and then what he was doing in the studio, was super thin for him."
You can view some of those actual tapes yourself at the exhibit. They sit in cases on the walls, which were intentionally left blank despite Haring's impulse to cover any blank surface. A good example of that: Grace Jones's dress. Haring collaborated with the singer on a music video for her song "I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect For You)."
The video runs on Haring's own boxy little CRT TVs in the gallery.
"The whole thing culminates with this amazing moment where you see Haring painting this absolutely vast tarp — you know, the size of a building — and you realize only at the end of the video that it's actually a skirt. And then Grace Jones rises out of it like a goddess and becomes this kind of figure of reverence. The way that they collaborated on projects like this is really groundbreaking, that you would have a fine artist working with a pop artist like that.
"I think it's also important to say that there's a lot of provocative implications here in terms of ethnicity, because you have this white artist painting a Black body. And then, in fact, Haring painted himself in a reverse palette. So he's painting her dark skin with white paint, and then he painted himself white and painted dark lines on top of that. So there's a real kind of exchange going on here."
The exhibit not only features his work, but also many of Haring's belongings — the glasses, the TVs, the mixtapes. They all came from the Keith Haring Foundation. Adamson says they bring the artist to life in a way his work alone can't.
"The foundation was set up by Haring in his lifetime, so showing a — frankly — unusual awareness of planning for the future. And they have a very large number of his artworks, as well as personal effects. So in this case, we have a pair of Nike trainers that he painted, a pair of sweatpants, some of his brushes. And these really bring alive the energy and kind of speed and spontaneity of his practice. And it's kind of like having him in the room, which is really wonderful."
Other items came from collector Larry Warsh. He's the second-largest lender to the show. And Adamson says the idea for the whole program came out of conversations with Warsh as they worked on a book about the same thing, under the same title: "Keith Haring in 3D."
"So he is New York-based, and he's been around since the '80s. He probably started collecting in 1984 or '85, he thinks, and directly from the artists in most cases. So he was very aware of Haring and Basquiat and the whole scene around them, and was able to save some of these pieces as relics, really, of the time. And since then has really focused on these 3D objects and on Haring as a sculptor.
"So he had also been interested in publishing. That was the business he was in, and has done a great many books, and had been developing a book on Haring's 3D practice. I got involved first as an editor of that book, and then I happened to be out here visiting Crystal Bridges and mentioned the project to the folks here, and we thought, oh, this would make a great exhibition, and here we are.
"But it really should be emphasized that it was Larry's idea before any of us got to it. So in addition to him lending, you know, a good third of the show, probably, along with the foundation, which was the other major lender, and then many institutions and other private collectors — you know, really a lot of the inspiration has come from Larry Warsh."
Gomez says Warsh knew Haring personally and had similar foresight to preserve artifacts from the artist's life.
"So that beam is a perfect example. That beam is something that would have been in Haring's studio that Larry paid for to have pulled out and sort of conserved."
And Adamson says that at times, it seems like Warsh might have placed more importance on these objects than Haring himself did.
"One of the vases, the most important vase in the show, actually, because it was the first one that Haring made — he said that when he first saw it, it had dirty laundry in it."
Keith Haring's art, while simple and oftentimes lighthearted on the surface, could have serious meaning behind it. He pushed boundaries and did not shy away from polarizing issues of the time, like the HIV/AIDS crisis, apartheid in South Africa or the crack cocaine epidemic. Adamson says he questioned the status quo. Some works here reflect that dialogue.
"In fact, we're now standing in this part of the exhibition that's about his totems — these large-scale wooden sculptures that specifically refer to Native American totem poles, as they've come to be called. And that was very typical of the time, that there wasn't a lot of sensitivity around the idea of being inspired by another culture. Today we might call it appropriation. Then, I think he would have just seen it as a form of paying respect to this other tradition that he found to be powerful and in some ways magical, and trying to bring that magic into a contemporary, technologically, electronically oriented culture. That's really the way he was thinking about it. And maybe we think about it differently now. Maybe not. It was kind of up to each visitor to decide what they think.
"I certainly think when it comes to the way that he worked with Grace Jones, that just seems like he — and she — are sailing past a lot of the hang-ups that Americans have about race, and showing that there's a much cooler, more fun way of thinking about it, which is that it's all a form of performance, and you can occupy whatever position you want."
And Haring's final work is on display, too. In 1987, the artist was diagnosed with HIV, then AIDS a year later. This was during a time when the public didn't understand the disease and largely feared it, as the virus primarily affected men in the gay community. The condition was stigmatized along with the people suffering from it. Haring never shied away from talking about his diagnosis and championed HIV/AIDS advocacy until his death in 1990. His final work, a bronze triptych altarpiece, is on display at Crystal Bridges.
"As I understand it, it would have originally been made on these large slabs of clay. He would have incised into them, and then they were cast into bronze. So these are — these are pretty heavy. Three pieces. They got assembled here on site. But the sort of imagery and iconography, I think, is really powerful and very emotional, especially when you consider that it's the last work he ever made."
It sits in another small room, flanked by a TV playing an MTV interview in which Haring talks about living with AIDS. There is also a large quilt hanging on the opposite wall.
"I think it's a really powerful part of the exhibition. It's one of the only places where you hear his voice, and I think it's really fitting to sort of be able to walk in here, spend some time, but then you walk back out into the sort of joy of the pop shop.
"I'll also talk about the AIDS quilt, because this is a very powerful object. This is, I think, one of maybe 15 panels that are dedicated to Keith Haring. We worked with the AIDS Memorial Group to be able to bring this here, but this is a panel that was made by elementary school kids in West Virginia, commemorating again and honoring Keith Haring. But you see a lot of his iconic sort of motifs, the radiant baby, you see the sort of dancing, barking dog. And I think it's really sort of powerful when you consider the fact that, again, elementary school kids were making this. They even included the sort of map of their state across different panels. But this not only commemorates Haring, it also honors the lives of others who lost their lives to AIDS complications."
After the triptych, you can view a white elephant that was passed from Andy Warhol to Jean-Michel Basquiat to Haring, then exit to a recreation of the Pop Shop, Haring's own temporary gallery in which he sold merchandise of his work. Crystal Bridges has their own, too, complete with original swag, available for purchase.
You can visit "Keith Haring in 3D" right now through January 2027. Tickets are $18. Just go to CrystalBridges.org for more information, and you can also check out previous reporting to learn more about Crystal Bridges' new expansion. This temporary gallery is only a portion of what's new at the museum.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
