More than 120 Keith Haring pieces are coming to L.A. next year — here’s how to see them

Keith Haring’s colorful, animated imagery may be commercially ubiquitous — found on T-shirts, mugs, rugs, even a signature Barbie Doll donning a Haring print on pink pants — but the late Pop artist has never had a survey exhibition at a museum in Los Angeles. Until now.

The Broad museum will present “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” in May . The exhibition, organized by the museum’s curator and exhibitions manager, Sarah Loyer, will feature more than 120 artworks including paintings, drawings, videos, sculptures and graphic works, as well as imagery of Haring’s more ephemeral public art works, such as his subway drawings and murals. The exhibition will also include personal ephemera and documentation, such as buttons, children’s toys and posters the artist made to support activist causes and organizations, most of which is coming from the New York-based Keith Haring Foundation. Work on view in the exhibition will span from the late 1970s, when Haring was a student, through 1988, shortly before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 at age 31.

“Keith Haring is an artist that’s been important to the founding of the Broad collection — the ‘80s was such an important time for the collection — so in a way it feels sort of part of our DNA as an institution to put on a show like this,” Loyer says. “Even the title feels really aligned with our approach to the public at the museum — that focus on accessibility and on creating an environment of welcome.”

Eli and Edythe Broad began collecting Haring’s work in 1982 along with other artists who were integral to the New York Pop art scene at the time, such as Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They were drawn to Haring’s work, Loyer says, for its vibrant, whimsical energy, but also for its social and political relevance with regard to the nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid movements as well as the HIV/AIDS crisis — Haring’s work gave voice to those movements.

Haring’s work has gone on view in Los Angeles before. There’s a Keith Haring mural at the ArtCenter College of Design and the artist had a show at Kohn Gallery in 1988. His sculptures appeared at the Pacific Design Center in 1999. But the Broad exhibition is his first major survey in L.A.

Loyer couldn’t speak to why it’s taken so long to realize that here. “It’s definitely a question that’s been on our minds too,” she says. “He’s been an artist we’ve wanted to pursue since as long as we’ve opened — but we’ve only been around seven years.”

“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody,” she adds, will likely resonate with L.A.’s creative communities, both in the art world and beyond.

“It’s a story of a young artist finding his voice and making really powerful, really graphic work that spoke to the issues that are central to that moment of the 1980s — many of which remain crucial today, like capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, as well as his involvement with AIDS activism and the LGBTQ community.”

The special exhibition will fill 10 ground-floor galleries at the Broad. The Broad will simultaneously showcase work by Haring contemporaries, including Scharf, Warhol and Basquiat as well as George Condo and Jenny Holzer, in its free third floor galleries.

Keith Haring’s “Untitled” (1984).

(From the Broad Art Foundation. © Keith Haring Foundation)

Haring’s work lends itself to immersive presentations, all the rage right now in art exhibitions. One gallery in the Haring exhibition will be entirely bathed in black light, mimicking a show Haring held in the basement of New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982. It will feature a grouping of Day-Glo paintings and sculptures. Haring always painted to music and was known to make mixtapes, with everything from classical, jazz and soul to house music and hip hop; music from his tapes, and tapes others made for him, will play in the black-lit Broad gallery.

The museum’s gift shop will, not surprisingly, get in on the action. It will pay homage to Haring’s Soho retail space, the Pop Shop, which the artist founded in 1986 and which featured prints and merchandise such as wearable streetwear, hats and buttons, not to mention an inflatable baby.

Broad director Joanne Heyler said, in the announcement, that Haring’s global influence has been “profound.”

“It is our distinct pleasure to share a deep and varied representation of his emblematic visual language,” she said, “and to highlight the prolific ways he spoke through his art and activism about social issues while celebrating joy, solidarity, community and hope.”

Exhibition tickets — prices haven’t been set yet — will be available this spring on the museum’s website.