Keith Haring’s journals (Penguin Books, 2010) open with the nineteen-year-old burgeoning artist hitchhiking across the Midwest. Before he moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, the kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania followed the Grateful Dead, selling t-shirts, getting high, and seeing the country. In Minnesota he found a tree by the St. Croix River that he was “gonna come back to, someday” (2). After the Dead show in Minneapolis, he and his companion hitched a ride and ate in a bar on the North Dakota border surrounded by farmers who commented on Haring’s hair when he went to the bathroom (“Rednecks!” he writes, though it’s unclear if this is a complaint or just observation) (3). Later, they get “a ride to Des Moines, Iowa, with a really neat guy who had tame raccoons” (6).

In New York, Haring embraced his sexuality and developed the style that made him one of the most recognizable and widely reproduced artists in the world. Throughout the remarkably productive later years of his too-short life, he only sporadically found time to return to his journal; the Minnesota tree forgotten like so many of the whims we move past as we grow up and our worlds get bigger. Yet, even when his world was very big, Haring returned to the Midwest in residencies that demonstrate how he realized the goals he made for himself in that first anxious journal entry when he decided to live “life my way . . . forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and live . . . Just live till I die.” Everywhere he went until his death at thirty-one from AIDS-related illness, Haring brought an energetic spirit that inspired people to expand their ideas and optimism with which he faced the world’s most challenging realities. Two recent exhibitions at Midwest museums put this tireless creativity, generosity, and compassion on display, emphasizing Haring’s global importance but also the ongoing significance of his presence in places far from the New York art scene that made him famous.

Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody, organized by The Broad, concluded at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this past September. An ambitious, blockbuster survey of Haring’s visual style, artistic biography, and activism, it weaves expansively through several galleries and is accompanied by a richly illustrated full-color catalog. On view forty years after Haring’s short-term residency in Minneapolis, the exhibition’s Minnesota iteration includes small additions based on his time there.

To My Friends at Horn: Keith Haring and Iowa City at the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art is a smaller and more focused exhibition that considers Haring’s trips to Iowa City in 1984 and 1989, the result of his correspondence with Colleen Ernst, an art teacher at Ernest Horn Elementary School, that began when Ernst sent Haring a postcard in 1982. The Stanley features two rarely seen murals made during those visits. Untitled (1984) depicts a mutant Day-Glo caterpillar with eight legs, a computer head, and a dollar sign face ridden by headless human figures and surrounded by radiating lines. Painted with live jazz accompaniment at a local mall, the work references Haring’s ongoing concerns about capitalism and technology.

A Book Full of Fun (1989), Haring’s second Iowa City mural is, deservedly, the exhibition’s primary subject. Made for Horn’s library, it depicts an open book (playfully labeled “Book” with a corresponding arrow) with a smiling face spread across its pages. A large thought bubble emerges from its spine, crowded with fantastical characters, letters, and numbers. Photos in a neighboring display case document how Haring started by painting irregular shapes in primary colors, green, and turquoise across the plain white ground, using those shapes as the basis for completing his figures with bold black lines. A polka-dot-bikini-clad elephant falls off a surfboard above a bewildered slice of just-popped toast. A daisy grows out of a grinning head with legs, no body, and a big red nose, and a kangaroo carries a frowning baby in their pouch. These and the many other exuberant figures that play in the bubble and extend beyond its borders make the mural an absorbing “I spy” game that presents reading as the foundation for unlimited imagination. Painted with the artist’s instruction that it never be removed or sold, the mural came to the Stanley on a thick section of wall (it could not be moved safely otherwise) and will return to Horn following renovations to the building, making this the first and likely only time it will be exhibited outside the school.

While the scale of the Walker exhibition offers a more comprehensive look at Haring’s life and career, the Stanley show is a touching case study of the larger exhibition’s titular sentiment, “art is for everybody” (a quote taken from Haring’s journals), and its lasting impact on one community. At their best, both exhibitions demonstrate how Haring’s art acts as a “fallout shelter against cynics in the atmosphere” (Robert Farris Thompson, Journals, xxiv) without shying away from protest.

Both exhibitions aim to introduce Haring to a broad viewership. Curators likely rightfully assume that while his distinctive iconography and visual style will be familiar to most casually interested visitors, the details of his biography, activism, and the longer arc of his artistic practice may be significantly less so. Each show thus opens with the guerilla origins of Haring’s famous figures and public persona on subway platforms. In 1980, characters such as his barking dog and “radiant baby” emerged as simple, speedy drawings in white chalk on the black paper that occupied temporarily empty advertising spaces. The Walker effectively illustrates this formative period in the first of its several galleries. There, multiple, near-life-size slideshow projections display Tseng Kwong Chi’s documentary photographs of Haring’s subway artworks. A record of the artist’s arrest for a misdemeanor for reckless property damage appears next to a poster advertising a publication of Tseng’s photographs and, a couple of galleries over, a 1982 CBS Evening News profile on Haring shows one of his many brief arrests interspersed with scenes from his first Soho gallery show. All indicate the almost immediate contradictory multiplicity of Haring’s career as simultaneously an antiestablishment rebel, art world darling, and highly commercial popular artist.

Tseng’s role as Haring’s long-term documentarian receives at least a brief mention in both exhibitions, as do many of Haring’s predecessors and collaborators, including choreographer Bill T. Jones, and graffiti artists such as Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), Lee Quiñones, and LA II (Angel Ortiz). Jones contributes a nuanced reflection to The Broad’s catalog, describing both the racial power dynamics involved in his project with Haring as well as its “spirit of fun and freedom” (143), and Tom Finkelpearl’s excellent essay further considers Tseng as both his friend’s photographer and an artist in his own right.

That Haring was entering an already established street art community populated primarily by Black and Latinx artists receives some elaboration in a brief wall text at the Walker, as does the at-times vaguely appropriative nature of the artist’s line and style. Performance studies scholar Ricardo Montez discusses Haring’s complex relationship to other artists, cultural histories, and racial identities at length in Keith Haring’s Line (Duke University Press, 2020) and is quoted in curator Sarah Loyer’s catalog essay. Kimberly Drew addresses Haring’s white privilege (even as he faced significant discrimination as a gay man during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic) and his sincere engagements with community more fully in her illuminating contribution.

The Walker exhibition benefits from space for monumentality and breadth, encompassing Haring’s art school days, sexually explicit images, performance collaborations, environmental and antiapartheid activism, and commercialization of his own work through the Pop Shop. Its scale and variety are exciting, and some of Haring’s largest and most colorful artworks are displayed to awesome effect. It’s also clear that part of Haring’s brilliance as a communicator came from knowing precisely who he was making art for at any given moment. Art for everybody is not necessarily the same art for everybody all at once. This creates a difficult task for curators, however, and leads to penis drawings cordoned off from designs for children’s chairs and public murals appearing only in small-scale photos. A flashing video projection somewhat overshadows the corner dedicated to Haring’s time at the Walker which is represented on a small scale by his black-and-white Art Fest poster, photos of a children’s theatrical performance with Haring-designed sets, and a no-longer-extant mural of another computer-headed mutant similar to his Iowa City mural of the same year. More than an issue of curation, this awkwardness is a testament to the diversity of Haring’s work and its effectiveness outside of traditional gallery spaces, a quality that can make the many vivid billboards and bus stop ads promoting the show around Minneapolis seem almost as impactful as the exhibition itself.

At the Stanley, a three-dimensional lithograph by Red Grooms introduces Haring. Subway (1986) is a small (roughly one square foot) cutaway of passengers on a crowded and graffitied NYC subway car pulling into a station where the artist is nearly finished with a new drawing. The crouched Haring, in his distinctive glasses with chalk in hand, looks back over his shoulder at the viewer and smiles. Like a pop-up book or shoebox diorama, Subway offers a delightfully playful entry into a show that centers around Haring’s visits to an elementary school while refraining from offering a diluted portrayal of the artist’s career. Turning a corner, visitors enter a compact but well-arranged gallery space where Haring’s Iowa City murals hang opposite a timeline describing the artist’s life alongside Iowa City’s early relationship to the gay rights movement and AIDS activism. A pair of artworks on loan from the Haring Foundation is installed to the left and right, and there is a small reading nook stocked with picture books on Haring, art, and queer identity.

Most impactful in providing context for the murals, however, is the comprehensive display of archival materials from Haring’s visits to Horn. This collection features moving tributes to the children’s fondness for Haring and his care for them (including a bulletin board of photographs, video footage of students singing Happy Birthday to the artist less than a year before his death, interviews with some of those students today, and a case of handwritten doodles and notes), now made more poignant by the recent death of the beloved art teacher and Haring’s initial Iowa City contact, Ernst, known to twenty-five years of students as “Dr. Art.” One of her self-portraits is also on view. These two people believed in the importance of art—especially accessible and empathetic art—to children’s education. In one letter from Haring to Ernst, the artist notes that “it’s really incredible to me that the school took the initiative to institute a discussion about AIDS . . . It makes me proud I had the courage to talk about it . . . Education is the key to stopping this thing!” Haring’s joyous library mural and earnest emphasis on education feel as important now as they were forty years ago. In August, Iowa’s SF 496, a book ban and “don’t say gay” bill, challenged by educators, mental health experts, and the ACLU, went into effect. A children’s biography of Harvey Milk included in the Stanley exhibition’s reading nook is among the texts that could be banned in schools.

The Walker exhibition concludes powerfully with Haring’s Unfinished Painting (1989). Energetic lines and dancing figures appear in purple, black, and white in the painting’s upper-left corner but stop abruptly giving way to uneven drips and blank canvas. It is a testament to the many artworks left unfinished or never made by those who have died in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We will never know what else Haring might have done. Yet his work continues in these exhibitions—creating a safe space for reading banned books in Iowa and making Minneapolis more colorful. Around the University of Minnesota’s campus, inspired hands have even taken to doodling Haring-esque dancers on light poles and window frames, out on the street for everybody.