The Subway Chalk Years

He was born on May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of an amateur cartoonist and a homemaker, and grew up in Kutztown drawing Disney characters at the kitchen table. He moved to New York in 1978 for the School of Visual Arts and spent the next decade drawing in white chalk on the black paper covering unrented subway-station advertisement frames — five thousand subway drawings between 1980 and 1985, by his own count — that built the visual vocabulary the world now knows as the radiant baby, the barking dog, the dancing figures. He died of AIDS-related complications at his Manhattan loft on February 16, 1990, at thirty-one.

Sofía Estrada's biography opens earlier and follows the arc with the documentary care the subject demands. The book traces the Kutztown childhood and the bisexual coming-of-age, the SVA years and the downtown New York scene with Basquiat and Madonna and Klaus Nomi and Grace Jones, the 1986 Pop Shop opening on Lafayette Street that made the Haring image affordable to the people who saw it in the subway, the long Kutztown trips and the Children's Village mural work, the 1988 AIDS diagnosis and the Keith Haring Foundation established the same year, and the morning of February 16, 1990.

What emerges is a portrait of the Pennsylvania-born New York graffiti artist whose subway-drawing decade built the most democratically distributed body of imagery in late-twentieth-century American visual art.