[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. We are discussing Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. We've talked about Haring's upbringing in rural Pennsylvania, the incubator that Pittsburgh turned out to be, and his graffiti drawing in New York.

Today, we've arrived at Keith Haring, the star. In his late 20s, he was partying with Madonna and Grace Jones. He spent time with boyfriends as long as they didn't get in the way of his career, and what a career it was. He painted the Berlin Wall. He painted a mural called Tuttomondo in Pisa. He painted an 88-foot-tall mural next to a children's hospital in Paris so the kids would have something to look at.

He had a great affinity for kids. He often worked with city kids around New York to get more kids into art. If you wanted a Keith Haring design of your own, in 1986, you could get it at the Pop Shop at 292 Lafayette Street. His distinctive style, graced buttons, T-shirts, and sneakers, he thought the art world was a bit elitist, and that everyone should be able to own a Keith Haring if they wanted.

Despite his fame and fortune, Haring felt the pull of activism. He created logos for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa and the Silence = Death series to raise awareness around AIDS. On August 10th, 1989, Keith Haring gave an interview to Rolling Stone and announced to the world that he had contracted the disease. Here he is speaking in an MTV News interview about why he went public with his diagnosis.

Keith Haring: More and more, the more it became to personally affect my life, the more it became necessary to really deal with it and to talk about it more. I think the thing that was the turning point in deciding to talk about it to the extent I talked about it in the recent Rolling Stone interview was the fact of having it and having to decide to admit to the public that I was sick because partly out of frustration from watching the way other public figures have dealt with it, from Rock Hudson to Liberace to whatever.

Most of the way that people in public have dealt with it has been to admit that they have it, but to not really want to talk about it so that you become malleable and become able to let the media make you into whatever image they want to, so that they can perpetrate this image of shame and guilt and perpetrate this idea that it is almost some kind of payback or something.

By being silent about it, you let them manipulate it the way they will manipulate anything that they can and project the image that they want to project. I think that at a certain point that I realized a while ago that at a certain point, I was going to have to talk about it just because of the way that I've dealt with all other political issues and social issues in my own work and in my life. Because, for me, the same reason that I dealt with politics in my work was because my work and all art really is about life.

Alison Stewart: Keith Haring left behind a world of work. The value of his pieces has increased 148% between 2017 and 2022. A recent piece went for $6 million. It all started with a gallery owner, an unusual choice, as you'll hear from Brad Gooch.

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Alison Stewart: Keith Haring chose to work with, I never get his last name right, Tony Shafrazi.

Brad Gooch: Yes, you got it.

Alison Stewart: Yay. He had quite a reputation. [chuckles] He defaced as Picasso. He went on to become a big gallery owner. I believe it's since closed. What did Keith like about having Tony represent him?

Brad Gooch: Tony Shafrazi was an interesting choice. I mentioned before that Keith was interested in getting around the gallery system. One thing that happened because of the subway project is this is where all the buzz begins about Keith Haring. He doesn't really need to go take his slides around and try to get a dealer and a show. He has in the first one-man show with Tony Shafrazi in SoHo.

I think part of his attraction probably was Tony Shafrazi's outsider status. Keith never agreed with or was sympathetic with Tony's having spray-painted Picasso's Guernica during the Vietnam War with a message that somehow, it was an activist protest gesture on Shafrazi's part who, at that point, was a young artist also. Therefore, he was kind of anathema to the art world and wasn't allowed in the Museum of Art for a long time, the Museum of Modern Art for a while.

Keith's going with him already kind of shows what lane he wanted to be in. The other was that Shafrazi had this big gallery. It was the biggest. It was a new gallery at the highest ceilings. It was the biggest gallery in SoHo at that moment. Keith was attracted to that and he was as simple as that too. He had the scale of it. He liked that it was just beginning and that some of his friends would also be in the gallery.

Kenny Scharf was represented by Tony Shafrazi. That kind of community clubhouse was always important to Haring. I think all those things work together. It wasn't a one-way relationship. He had a number of important influences on Keith Haring. Certainly, he had sophisticated connections and was able to sell his work and bring people to see his work, but Kenny also was pushing-- In the beginning, he was pushing Keith, "Why don't you do paintings?"

Keith said, "I hate paintings. I don't want to do paintings. It's too old-fashioned. I don't like canvas," all this thing. He notices these plastic tarps that Con Edison is using to cover their construction sites in the street. He says, "Oh, I could paint on those." He starts, this is before the first show in the gallery of the Shafrazi gallery, painting paintings on this plastic tarp. That allows him to return to painting.

Shafrazi said, "One of these was in the Carnegie Museum of Art." That's the kind of thing. It happens again later with sculpture that Shafrazi knows. There's a little cutout Keith had done of a dog. One of his imagery on his desk. He painted it red. Tony picks it up and he said, "Did you ever think about blowing this up to 30 feet to a big scale?" Keith said, "Well, I can't do that. I can't do sculpture. I don't know how to do sculpture."

Then Tony sets him up with Lippincott, which is an important fabricator who was doing Calder and different artists at the time, Claes Oldenburg. Keith makes sculpture. A lot of important moments in his life also have to do with his collaboration with Tony Shafrazi, who is an unorthodox dealer but successful. He did the Basquiat x Warhol show in the gallery, which was so hated at the time and is now so loved and was shown in Paris recently.

Alison Stewart: Keith Haring's first big show. It was a big media event. CBS News covered it. It was wall-to-wall people. Who came? What was it like?

Brad Gooch: Yes, it was interesting. Not only was the art fresh, but he brought in a new demographic, in a way, to the art world. There were hundreds of these kids who had been doing graffiti and subway art. They came to the show. There were established artists, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Francesco Clementi. There were kids, important group for Keith.

He had made coloring books, so there are kids coloring on their coloring books. Keith had realized his wish and had a Black DJ lover at that time, Juan Dubose. Juan Dubose was spinning music for this event. In the basement in black Light were all his collaborations with LA II. I know Charles Osgood was actually the announcer for that segment and on the news. At the end, he said that the show had sold out for $250,000.

Not bad for a 24-year-old kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania. That kind of odd voice. That also establishes Keith Haring and his influence. There's an influence in the surface of his work, but there's also the beginning of an influence of breaking down these sorts of distinctions between high art and low art, public art, comic art, street art, political art, and creating more of the world that we live in today.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Brad Gooch. We're talking about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. It's our choice for Full Bio. The Rubells were big buyers of his work. He became obsessed with Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol became obsessed with him. He's living a very different life than he did growing up in Kutztown. In acquiring this fame and fortune, did it change him? The big question, did he sell out?

Brad Gooch: [laughs] I didn't know that was a big question still, but it turns out it is. [chuckles] In some way, nothing changed him. I think I noticed when I was reading his journal entries, I spent a lot of time at the foundation. This book took six years to write. The Haring Foundation is in Keith's old studio on Broadway. Going through these early journals and reading his late teenage journals with him and Suzy in Pittsburgh and about how he wanted to be an artist and what kind of artist he wanted to be, there was this crazily ambitious, naive, utopian view. I just thought, "How sweet to see an artist as a young man." It's like portrait of the artist as a young man.

Then when I came more to the end and was reading some journal entries, there was also a 22-hour interview with Keith near the end of his life done by John Gruen that I listened to. Then I realized it's the same voice. You just hear the same idealism. The ambition is still outsized. Now, it's happened, so it sounds, "Oh yes, of course. Why not?" In that way, there's something that didn't change about him. Obviously, his life got much bigger in terms of this kind of fame and celebrity and his infatuation with other famous and celebrated people in a Warholian fashion.

Alison Stewart: Madonna is in and out of his life.

Brad Gooch: Very much. Sleeping on the couch on Broome Street and singing at his first party of life, which are birthday parties he gave to himself every year. The first one was done at Paradise Garage, Black and Latin dance floor downtown. The distinction between gallery show and party is blurred by him. Finally then, later in the decade, he opens the Pop Shop downtown. Here then, he makes this blurring that nobody has really done yet. No artist of that time opened a shop.

Even Warhol was nervous about this. The people wouldn't see Haring as a fine artist. They wouldn't take him seriously. Jeffrey Deitch said that Keith invented the new genre, which was the art product or art merchandise. What he wants to do is have a place where he can sell art at price points available to all those kids who came to the show. At Pop Shop, he's selling T-shirts that he thinks of as prints and pins and, later in the decade, safe sex condom cases.

That's the point of Pop Shop. The place itself was immersively painted by him. Leo Castelli, who did a show of the sculpture, said that the Pop Shop was itself a work of art, which is true, that the ceiling now hangs over the lobby in the New-York Historical Society. Keith got tremendous pushback for this because of the idea that there was a distinction between fine art, high art, and anything else.

The leading critic/cynic about Keith Haring's work at the time was Robert Hughes, who was the art critic at Time magazine. He had been targeting Haring and Basquiat for a while. He wrote about "Keith Boring" and "Jean-Michel Basketcase." He said that Haring was a disco decorator, so there was a shadow of homophobia also, I think, to this resistance to Haring at the time. There was racism, as Haring pointed out, when he called Basquiat the Eddie Murphy of art.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's great.

Brad Gooch: Especially East Village artists spray-painted capitalist and sellout on Pop Shop. Actually, Pop Shop never made any money. I don't know that it was intended to make money. He then did an annex in Tokyo.

Alison Stewart: That was a big disaster. '86 is when he opened on Lafayette and then they went over to Tokyo because of Tokyo law.

Brad Gooch: Yes, this is like that there still is a naivete around Keith Haring, I think. He didn't want to do business with corporations in Japan or with big department stores. He wanted to do what he had done in New York, which is open his little Pee-wee Herman-style store.

[laughter]

Brad Gooch: There are problems. First of all, he also had a high degree of control over what he did and quality control. He wanted to control the product, have it shipped to Japan. This was raising costs. Also, he was used to fake Harings. There were a lot of rip-offs of Keith Haring. In Japan, though, it became another level, which is department stores and corporations that had wanted to collaborate with him, then just punished him by doing really state-of-the-art reproductions of Haring T-shirts and things and selling them at a tenth of the cost on the corner.

For some reason, everything about Tokyo backfired for Keith. It was a low point for him because Tokyo was his second city. His father had been stationed in Japan when he was in the military. He'd grown up with all these stories of Japan. He loved calligraphy, basically saw himself as a calligrapher where his line expressed his personality. He loved Japan as it was in the '80s with all this anime and toys. All of this was a great disappointment for him. It dovetailed with a time in his history and the history of the time of the AIDS crisis really exploding during those years.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Brad Gooch. We're talking about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. It's our choice for Full Bio. He traveled the world just creating murals all over the place. Could you give us an example of a few places where you would see a Keith Haring around the world?

Brad Gooch: Well, sure. You can see Crack Is Wack, which he did in New York on the East Side Highway coming downtown in, I think, 180. That was when there was, actually, a studio assistant of his became addicted to crack, which was this fast-moving version of cocaine, almost instantly addictive. He did this Crack Is Wack mural in a neighborhood that was especially being hit by drug dealers at the time. In fact, it's still there.

In Pisa, he did, six months before he died, a large mural called Tuttomondo, which is on the side of a Roman Catholic Church actually in Pisa, and is now a draw, a destination. There's the leaning tower and there's the Keith Haring mural. A lot of these have to be restored. One was restored recently in Amsterdam that he had done on the side of a book building that he did in Barcelona. An AIDS activist warning, kind of. He did these warning murals. There's often with Haring, a political activism or artivism messaging.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you, when did he begin to take on political and moral issues?

Brad Gooch: Well, again, always, when he was 12 years old, he was at the first Earth Day celebration on the campus of Kutztown University. Three Mile Island happened near Kutztown, this nuclear-near disintegration. He took on anti-nuclear proliferation early on. That was one of his themes. Certainly, racism, apartheid, gay liberation. Later, AIDS activism. He was very active during the two Reagan campaigns of '80 and '84. The second one turning over his downtown subway gallery to get out the vote into anti-Reagan cartoons.

He wrote in his SVA journal, "The message is the message." That was a response to Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message." Basically, he wasn't ironic as an artist and he also wasn't fussy about what surface he was working on. He was very interested in message and in communication. One of the best shows of Haring's work after his death, I think, was in San Francisco Museum of Art. It was called The Political Line. He was often using his line to get people to be aware of safe sex, for instance, different causes.

Alison Stewart: When did Keith Haring become an activist for AIDS?

Brad Gooch: Well, in some sense, he was always aware of AIDS and has some messaging about it. Certainly, the safe sex. In 1988, in Tokyo, again, he discovers these red spots on him, which turned out to be Kaposi's sarcoma, which was an opportunistic cancer, one of the many under the umbrella of AIDS. He comes back to New York and is unofficially diagnosed. He always suspected he was being HIV positive. Interestingly then, I was very interested in this part of the book, having been around at the time.

Many people died of AIDS, but people could die very differently of AIDS, both medically and in terms of their attitude. Keith, from the beginning, again, had his own process. He almost immediately comes out, does a rock star move in Rolling Stone magazine and a big interview. He comes out as a PWA, a person with AIDS. This is when Rock Hudson was sick with AIDS and was denying it, when Donald Trump's lawyer, Roy Cohn, practically came back from the grave to say he had kidney cancer or he had pneumonia.

Obituaries at the time rarely gave AIDS as the cause of death. Long-term companions rarely were noted. Keith goes against that and that encourages people, I think. He then also turns his art over often. He did Silence = Death paintings. He did posters. He then was also very active in ACT UP, the organization that Larry Kramer had started, the main activist political organization at the time.

Peter Staley, who was the treasurer of ACT UP, told me that he used to go to Keith's studio. Keith would give him these brown paper bags full of cash like $10,000 of cash. Peter would go and put it in the ACT UP account in Citibank on LaGuardia Place. Also, Peter told me that in 1989, a third of the receipts of ACT UP were covered by Keith Haring, which no one knew. That part was under the radar, but he was very much with whatever he had and directly activist on the issue, and also inspiring.

Inspiring as coming out as a PWA, but also, he didn't melt away in terms of his work. He did more and more and more and more art and traveled to more and more and more places. I mentioned the mural in Pisa that he did about six months before his death. Three weeks before he dies, he does The Last Judgment triptych I mentioned in Yoko Ono's apartment. He's never in the hospital. He only has really three weeks where he's in his bed. On his deathbed, he's drawing his radiant babies until it becomes too frustrating and he can't finish it. I think Kenny Scharf has the last of those drawings. In many ways, he rose to the occasion and inspired people.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you, what can people learn from Keith Haring's unfortunately short life?

Brad Gooch: Well, I think he had to use whatever you have. He said, "You use whatever comes along." I find that attitude great. It explains his own DIY response to life. He would be working on whatever surface was available. I mentioned he was active, especially the second Reagan election of 1984, which was a landslide and seemed predetermined. Who was Keith Haring but a guy with some chalk, but it didn't stop him. He and Jenny Holzer did these trucks, "Get Out and Vote" trucks, and things.

I think just the way in which he sponged up whatever was available around him and then spun it into something else and his desire to always enhance people's lives visually and otherwise, I think all of this is something that you can personally be inspired by. He wasn't waiting around for inspiration. He wasn't waiting for anyone to give him permission. That was something that Kenny Scharf told me about SVA. You couldn't open a broom closet where there wasn't something by Keith Haring or the way that he met him painting himself into that corner. He didn't have a license to do it. He didn't ask the dean. That quality is always encouraging.

Alison Stewart: Brad Gooch is the author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us, Brad.

Brad Gooch: No, this was great. I enjoyed our conversation. Thanks.

Alison Stewart: Full Bio is engineered by Jason Isaac, post-production by Jordan Lauf, and written by me. You can catch the whole Full Bio conversation in our podcast feed this weekend. A note, we should point out that a Keith Haring mural is in the middle of a controversy right now in New York City. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation announced that it may demolish the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center in the West Village, about two blocks away from our studios here at WNYC. The mural, which was on a wall surrounding the pool, was painted by Keith Haring in the summer of 1987. It has yet to be decided by NYC Parks, but it is said, "It is in talks with the Keith Haring Foundation about 'options'."

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