Today is Keith Haring’s birthday! He would have been 54 years old. Google has honored him with a homepage Google Doodle. It reminded me that my cousin, who attended NYC’s School of Visual Arts at the same time as Haring, once told me that Keith was infamous at school for covering the bathrooms with porn graffiti. They’d quickly paint over it, and eventually he’d do it again. I bet they wish they’d have clear-coated it instead. I imagine it looked something like the former men’s room (now a conference room!) at the LGBT Community Center in New York City that Haring was invited to paint in 1989. The “Haring Bathroom” is now under restoration. From Passport:
Completed months before he died of AIDS, this mural is perhaps Haring’s most personal and resonant expression of sexual jouissance, and is the only Haring mural of its kind.
As part of the Center’s major renovation of 1998-2001, new, code-compliant bathrooms were created, and the old bathrooms were re-purposed as meeting rooms. But the Haring Bathroom needed a different approach. The partitions and toilets were removed but the tile walls and all the old pipes and ducts were left where they were when Keith originally painted on or around them.
“Keith Haring Mural Unveiled at the LGBT Community Center in New York City”
More photos: “The US$2 Million Bathroom Pop-Art Mural of Keith Haring” (The Playground)