Episode Details

In the early 1980s, a young artist dodged transit police in the New York subway to draw glowing, crawling babies in white chalk on blank black advertising panels, knowing each one would be erased within days. This episode follows Keith Haring from a Kutztown, Pennsylvania childhood drawing cartoons with his engineer father, through a teenage phase in the evangelical Jesus movement that taught him the power of simple iconography, to commercial art school in Pittsburgh, which he abandoned rather than learn to sell products.

We look at how studying semiotics at the School of Visual Arts shaped his universal visual language, how a photographer friend documented the subway drawings so the work survived, and how he went from the downtown scene to Soho galleries and international shows alongside Warhol and Basquiat. The conversation covers the controversial 1986 Pop Shop, his murals against crack cocaine and apartheid, figures stripped of race, gender, and age, his HIV diagnosis in 1987, the foundation he created in 1989, and the bronze triptychs he completed weeks before his death at 31.

• Why the anti-materialist Jesus movement left a lasting mark on his artistic strategy
• How the subway became a live laboratory for refining his symbols in front of commuters
• Why he saw the exclusive gallery system, not the Pop Shop, as the real compromise
• How he ran an analog viral campaign for social causes decades before social media
• How his final years became a public act of defiance against AIDS stigma