Last update:
April 10th
2001

the living room heart

corner Keith Haring -- 1958 - 1975 corner
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kutztownKeith Allen Haring was born on May 4th, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania. But the Harings lived in Kutztown, a nearby Pennsylvania Dutch farm community, where Keith was raised. In time, Keith became "big brother" to three sisters, Kay, Karen, and Kristen. The family lived a sheltered small-town life, with Keith's father working as a supervisor in a communications firm located in Allentown, and with his mother raising the children.

"Before Keith was even a year old," recalled Keith's mother, Joan, "he used to sit on his dad's lap after supper just drawing some gobbly-goo with crayons he'd been given. Then, later, his father, who was very good at drawing cartoon things, would show Keith how to draw circles. Then, he'd make a circle into a balloon or an ice-cream cone or make a face out of it, and put ears on it or make all kinds of animals. And that's how it all started."

From the first, Keith's art teachers in Kutztown were astonished at the boy's obsessive love of drawing. Said one, "With him it was an inborn thing." Another said, "Keith loved line. Anything that lent itself to line pattern, he loved. He worked so intricately! The way the pattern would carry through and around and in and out was just extraordinary. He had such imagination!"child

"When you're 8 or 9 or 10," said Keith's best childhood friend, Kermit Oswald, "you look across the classroom and there are people who stand out as real dorks and some who turn out to be kind of interesting. There was always something interesting about Keith. It was the way he dressed, it was the way he talked, it was the way he would smile, smirk, and roll his eyes. It was the way he could get himself out of trouble as fast as he could get into it. Anyway, Keith and I were always known as the artists in the school. We were both crazy about drawing."

kutztownIn high school, Keith knew he wanted to become an artist. Although he loved the cartoon characters of Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, and Charles Schultz (especially Charlie Brown), he now wanted to do abstract drawings. He started making little shapes that together would fill whole areas, with one shape leading into another shape, and with a line that seemed to flow endlessly - that could go on and on.

During a church trip to Washington, D.C., Keith visited the Hirshhorn Museum and there he saw a group of Marilyn Monroes by pop artist Andy Warhol. He was struck by the strong flat images and looked at them for a long, long time. Throughout his whole high school period he looked at art and studied art, because he knew that art would be his life. But on the way, Keith got into trouble.

"I was 15 when I began hanging out with a lot of kids who were troublemakers. We were a whole bunch of friends doing this, we'd go to concerts like the Grateful Dead - and I was letting my hair grow longer and longer, because, see, I wanted to be a hippie. I started experimenting with all kinds of drugs - and it really messed me up. My studies at school got worse and worse - and I did really stupid things. My parents were in a state about me. But I just had to break out of the conformity of Kutztown - I felt I was suffocating."

Keith's mother said, "We tried to get him to change, to stay home more, to study more. At fifteen, sixteen, we thought he was wasting his abilities, not making the most of his school years, spending too much time messing around. We felt we were failing, and yet we didn't know how to cope. We didn't know how to change him."

"I often felt I should have spent more time with Keith," his father, Allen, admitted. "Often we did things as a complete family, but having three girls and one boy, we ended up satisfying the majority rule - things that the girls wanted to do, not necessarily what Keith and I wanted to do. But even earlier on I felt I wasn't really getting through to him, because when we did do things together, we almost never talked. Then, when he was with his druggy friends, I just felt I wasn't breaking the ice. Maybe I didn't try hard enough. I couldn't get us together."

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All Haring images © Estate Of Keith Haring

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