Keith Haring: The End of the Line celebrates the 30th anniversary of Keith Haring's landmark temporary mural at Cranbrook Art Museum, created in 1987. Haring considered that project one of his best, and it marked a new direction in his visual language that continued until his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 32. Documentation of this pivotal project will be presented alongside two bodies of work — Apocalypse (1988) and The Valley (1989) — that were anticipated by the mural and made in collaboration with acclaimed beat poet William S. Burroughs. The exhibition is on view at the Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, November 17, 2017 – March 11, 2018.

Haring became widely celebrated for his comic-like drawings and paintings in the New York subways in the 1980s. At his lecture at Cranbrook on September 25, 1987, Haring discussed his intentions in these early subway explorations: “I started making drawings that were figurative after doing abstract work for almost five years, and for the first time, it seemed like I had made something that made sense to be in public because it had a kind of communicative power. [It] seemed like they should be in places where people could see them and think about them.” Haring’s subway drawings were ephemeral works that were documented by his friend and fellow artist Tseng Kwong Chi. A selection of these photographs along with a rare, surviving example of one Haring’s large-scale subway drawings, still intact on its advertising panel, will be on view.

The End of The Line concentrates on the last years of Haring’s life, when his work and activism got intensely personal after being diagnosed with AIDS. The Cranbrook mural introduced stylistic shifts of intentional drips and blotches, but it also depicted characters he continued to explore in Apocalypse and The Valley, such as jesters, masks, skulls, martyrs, and other religious icons. Entrenched in thoughts and philosophies about the end of times, Haring’s later works have art historical kinship with the chaotic storytelling of Hieronymus Bosch and violent playfulness of his friend and contemporary Jean-Michael Basquiat. The ominous texts by Burroughs stationed alongside them complement the energy of Haring’s drawings, which have the frenzy of an artist trying to process life before its end.

Keith Haring: The End of the Line is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Andrew Blauvelt and Steffi Duarte with the assistance of the Keith Haring Foundation and the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi.