“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” is a particularly apt name for the new traveling exhibition of the late artist’s work, which is on display through Sept. 8 at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“Those are his words,” said his sister Kristen Haring, who visited Minnesota for the opening. “It’s not just a marketing ploy. It’s a common phrase in Keith’s journals. One of his goals was to be accessible.”

The retrospective features more than 100 works and rarely seen archival materials from the artist, who died at the age of 31 from AIDS related complications in 1990. It includes major paintings, sculptures, drawings, video, photographs and source material from Haring’s personal journals.

A Pennsylvania native, Haring rose to fame thanks to the chalk graffiti he drew in New York City subways and while he went on to earn top dollar for his paintings, the prolific artist made his work widely available. Between 1982 and 1989, he produced more than 50 public artworks, many created voluntarily for hospitals, day cares and schools.

“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” includes items sold at the artist’s Pop Shop, a store in New York that sold Haring’s work and various memorabilia. The show runs April 27 to Sept. 8, 2024 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. (Carina Lofgren / Walker Art Center)

After Haring stopped his graffiti work — largely because people were taking them and selling them — he opened the Pop Shop, a small retail shop in Soho that sold his art at reasonable prices along with his imagery on everything from t-shirts to buttons to skateboards. As he once told the New York Times: “I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price. My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”

Haring’s father taught him how to draw

Kristen Haring, who is on the board of the Keith Haring Foundation, is the youngest of Haring’s three sisters. He was 12 years old when she was born and he took her under his wing. Growing up in what Kristen called a lower-middle class home, the pair shared a room.

“When I was born, he was just starting to make his own identity and break from the family,” she said. “I had no preconceived notion of who he was, that’s how he explained it to me. He was always showing me new things and teaching me new things. We spent a lot of time together. He’d take me in my stroller to the public library. And we continued to maintain a relationship after he moved to New York.”

An untitled Keith Haring work from 1982 features barking dogs, a recurring theme in his work. “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” runs April 27 to Sept. 8, 2024 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. (Courtesy of the Broad Art Foundation)

Without much disposable income, Keith’s father entertained him and his sisters by playing games based on drawing. “They would draw on the newspaper with crayons and draw on scrap paper. They used to practice drawing together. My father would say ‘How close can you get to drawing a perfect circle?’ or ‘Close your eyes and try drawing something,’ ” Kristen said.

He moved like a dancer

Haring’s work can come across as simplistic, but the exhibit crucially includes video footage of him at work. He did not sketch in advance, but instead would draw a border and then create with a free hand, using paint, chalk, marker and other media. He also worked quickly, translating the image from his head onto the canvas in front of him.

“To see him in motion … I think he moves his body almost the way a dancer does,” Kristen said. “He could paint a three-foot diameter circle in one sweep of his arm. I have heard people who are in the arts say there’s something very special about the quality of his line and the way he could draw like that.”

A series of televisions throughout the exhibit show vintage footage of the artist at work, part of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” which runs April 27 to Sept. 8, 2024 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. (Kameron Herndon / Walker Art Center)

Dancing figures, barking dogs and crawling babies are among the recurring motifs in Haring’s most famous work, but he also addressed any number of societal issues, from environmentalism to religion to race. He was active in the nuclear disarmament and anti-Apartheid movements as well as the HIV/AIDS crisis, which became especially personal after he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987 and AIDS the following year.

“If you look at his artwork through the lens of 2024, you would think he was always out (of the closet),” Kristen said. “He wasn’t always out. Outside of a limited circle, he did not have — nor did other queer people have — the space and safety to say he was gay. It really was HIV/AIDS that made him finally take the stance that someone’s got to say something.”

“Art Is for Everybody” includes public service posters he created for National Coming Out Day and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the grassroots political group that worked to end the AIDS pandemic. “He was not just doing drawings for ACT UP, he was at the meetings, at the rallies, writing letters and giving money. When he said in an interview with Rolling Stone that he was HIV positive, he had friends who stopped calling him. It took guts and not everyone stood up and responded to him in the most gracious way,” Kristen said.

The Walker Art Center’s Keith Haring exhibit features several examples of his art that addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis, including this 1989 poster for ACT UP. “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” runs April 27 to Sept. 8, 2024 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. (Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation)

The Walker made an impact on Haring

The exhibit acts as a sort of homecoming for Haring, as the Walker commissioned him for a residency in 1984. At that point in his career, his work was in galleries in New York, Europe and Japan. Almost all were commercial venues. The Walker residency changed that.

Deliberately left unfinished as he was in the final days of his battle with AIDS, this painting was one of the last works from Keith Haring. “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” runs April 27 to Sept. 8, 2024 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. (Courtesy of a private collection)

“It was the first time he was received by an institution on American soil and it meant so much to him to be taken seriously in his own country,” Kristen said. “After he visited the Walker, he kept talking about it to me with a magical quality. That visit made a real impact on him.”

Kristen said her brother had a wonderful spirit and presence. Prior to his death, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, which controls and licenses his work. It has also given away nearly 50 million dollars, with a dual focus on helping to enrich the lives of underprivileged children and supporting organizations that engage in HIV/AIDS education, prevention and care.

“He wasn’t a saint and I don’t mean to be unrealistic about the fact he was a complete human being, but he had an amazing energy and real warmth. He was very present. And when he was a 31-year-old who was staring death in the face, he decided the way he wanted to leave the world was by continuing to do charitable projects.”

‘Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody’

When: Through Sept. 8
Where: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls.
Tickets: $18
More info: 612-375-7600 or walkerart.org

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April 17 was a dark day for academic freedom in the United States. Columbia University President Nemat Shafik told a congressional hearing that some statements heard during recent protests — such as “from the river to the sea” — might be punished by the school. She also named several professors who were under investigation for allegedly antisemitic comments.

College faculty around the country were quick to condemn the hearing, which conjured the worst images of the Joseph McCarthy era: snoopy conservative lawmakers questioning scared university officials about who said what to whom and why. According to Irene Mulvey, national president of the American Association of University Professors, Shafik “threw academic freedom and Columbia University faculty under the bus.”

That’s true, and it’s frightening. But the professors under fire at Columbia have criticized Israel, echoing the dominant view on campus. It’s a lot harder to defend the faculty members who dissent from the received wisdom. And if we throw them under the bus, too, academic freedom will die.

Consider Carole Hooven, the Harvard University biologist who was pushed out of her teaching position after she told a Fox News television show in 2021 that sex was binary. Hooven took pains to emphasize that gender could take any number of forms, and that everyone — of every gender — deserved respect. But sex, she said, was different: male or female.

Within a few short days, the outrage machine kicked into high gear. The director of a diversity and inclusion task force in Hooven’s department tweeted that her remarks about sex were “transphobic and hateful.” Graduate students refused to serve as teaching assistants for her popular lecture course about hormones and behavior, which was canceled. So was Hooven.

She walked around campus with her head down, lest someone recognize her as “the ‘transphobe’ from whom students needed to be protected,” she wrote.

And nobody with any administrative authority at Harvard spoke out in her defense. Not the chair of her department. Not the head of the local AAUP chapter. And not Claudine Gay, who was the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time and later became president of the university.

The issue came up during Gay’s own fateful congressional testimony in December, before she lost her job as well. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg from Michigan asked her.

In reply, Gay said that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” But the biology of sex is a complex and divisive issue, and Gay did not protect Hooven’s right to dialogue about it. Nor did most Harvard faculty members, who sat on their hands while Hooven got pilloried.

Nobody questioned the scholarly chops of Hooven, who published a much-admired book on the science of testosterone. Instead, they said she had made trans people feel unwelcome and unsafe. She had to go.

If Hooven had denounced Israel as a colonialist and apartheid state — like several of the targeted Columbia professors did — would faculty members have stood by while she got pushed out, on the grounds that she made Jewish students feel unsafe? Of course not. Instead, we would have risen up to defend her academic freedom.

That’s what Columbia historian Christopher Brown did recently in a powerful campus speech that went viral. When Shafik told the congressional hearing that she would investigate the anti-Israel professors, Brown argued, she sacrificed academic independence to the whims of politics.

“There were members of Congress who wanted to decide who should be disciplined on this institution and how much, what should be taught, how it should be taught, who should teach, what academic department should exist and which should not, who should lose their leadership positions, who should be promoted, who should be fired,” Brown warned. “Those are academic questions; those are not congressional questions.”

Brown also condemned Shafik for calling in the police at Columbia, where they arrested more than 100 protesters.

But after the semester ends and the protests wane, the question of academic freedom will remain. And we can’t protect it from prying politicians if we’re playing politics with it ourselves.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was published in a 20th-anniversary edition by University of Chicago Press. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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