The Palm Springs Art Museum is setting up to host a major exhibit of Keith Haring’s work from the Rubel Family Collection in Miami. The work to be exhibited was produced largely after the period of his early mural and graffiti art. There are 70 paintings and drawings and one sculpture, spanning his career from his first gallery exhibition in 1982 to the time of his death in 1990 at the age of 31. The exhibition also includes works of other artists who were important friends and artistic peers in Haring’s life, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Andy Warhol. Contextualized by these contemporaries, Haring’s art is playful and colorful yet deeply wrought with social content, recording the lively artistic engagement and relevance to the New York art scene of the 1980s.

The deep representation of Haring’s work in the Rubell Family Collection allows the assemblage of an exhibition with an unconventional perspective. It strives to deconstruct the traditional view of Haring as a Pop artist who created memorable but somewhat superficial graphic icons in favor of an exploration of Haring as an accomplished draftsman concerned with line and mark-making as a metaphor and practice to address weighty themes that are too often overlooked in his art, including environmental destruction, consumerism and capitalism, poverty, religious dogma, AIDS, violence, and racism. What emerges is a recalibrated picture of an artist strongly engaged with the social and political issues of his era. Preeminent in the exhibition are works in which linear qualities and expressiveness are dominant over color and other compositional elements. Similar graphic concerns can be seen in certain of the works by Haring’s friends, and also apparent are parallelisms of social and humanistic subject matter. Haring attempted to bring different distressful elements of his era into focus to educate us about our social and natural environments. In one of the works in the exhibition, he wrote, “These drawings are about the Earth we inherited and the dismal task of trying to inherit it – against all odds.”