Keith Haring (May 4, 1958–February 16, 1990) was an American Neo-Pop artist active in the 1980s. His work differed greatly from traditional painting: it was simple and direct, often repeating a few motifs, and frequently cartoon-like in content. Babies, dogs, flying saucers, televisions, and graphic forms often appeared in his pictures. Because he was gay, he generally did not depict women. The colors in his paintings were initially the three primary colors; although he later added more, they remained basic colors. Haring began as a street graffiti artist. Utility poles, concrete columns, billboards, and signs all became canvases for him, while his tools ranged from pencils to spray cans and brushes—whatever came to hand. His sculptures were equally varied, made of materials ranging from papier-mâché to fiberglass. He also designed a great many posters and worked in performance art. Keith Allen Haring was born on May 4, 1958, at Community Hospital in Reading, Pennsylvania, while his father, Allen, was serving in Japan. His father returned home 10 months later; the family lived in California for 16 months before returning to Pennsylvania when Keith was three. Allen was good at drawing cartoons and taught Keith to draw lines and circles when he was little. Keith enjoyed collecting cartoons as a child and made crayon drawings such as Clown when he was six. He liked drawing dogs, and by age 11 he could assemble audio equipment under his father’s guidance. At his grandmother’s house, four blocks from his own, he also had access to magazines such as Life and Look. At 12, young Haring began drawing religious symbols. He was briefly a Boy Scout and began using drugs at 15. Keith had three younger sisters; he was quite distant from the two older ones and close only to the youngest. Keith moved to New York City at 19 and studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work had a strong Pop Art style.

His earliest works date from around 1980, when he sought out black spaces reserved for posters in New York subway stations and drew on them with white chalk. These were mostly compositions of abstract forms and animals with thick outlines, monochrome coloring, and unfilled interiors. His works frequently featured recurring visual motifs, such as barking dogs and kneeling, crouching figures. Haring soon became known in the New York art world. In 1983, the American CBS television network filmed him drawing graffiti in a subway station and being arrested, making him a household name overnight. Through continual exhibitions and artistic production, he subsequently entered museums as a graffiti artist, and the prices of his works rose accordingly. According to the American magazine Newsweek, in 1984 one of Haring’s paintings, Dog Wearing a Crocodile Mask, could command US$20,000. He was also invited to create action paintings at numerous museums. In 1985, the French National Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of the Netherlands held exhibitions devoted to him. In 1986, he opened a shop in New York’s SoHo district selling his own work, called the “Pop Shop.” In 1988, he learned that he had AIDS and began actively using his work to remind young people about safer sex and to campaign against the spread of AIDS. The Keith Haring Foundation was established in 1989, primarily to support research into AIDS treatment and programs promoting children’s welfare. Haring died in New York in 1990 from complications of AIDS, aged just 31. His paintings became one of the most distinctive expressions of twentieth-century visual art.