BIOGRAPHY:

Keith Haring always thought of himself as a funny-looking kid, which might be why kids all over the world responded to him. Keith said, " I found out that I can make any kid smile. It is probably from having a funny face to begin with - and looking and acting like a kid. And kids can relate to my drawings, because of the simple lines." "When you are 8 or 9 or 10," said Keith's best childhood friend, Kermit Oswald, "you look across the classroom and there are people who stand out as real dorks and some who turn out to be kind of interesting.

There was always something interesting about Keith. It was the way he dressed, it was the way he talked, it was the way he would smile, smirk, and roll his eyes. It was the way he could get himself out of trouble as fast as he could get into it. Anyway, Keith and I were always known as the artists in the school. We were both crazy about drawing." Keith Allen Haring was born on May 4th, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania. But the Harings lived in Kutztown, a nearby Pennsylvania Dutch farm community, where Keith was raised. In time, Keith became "big brother" to three sisters, Kay, Karen, and Kristen. The family lived a sheltered small-town life, with Keith's father working as a supervisor in a communications firm located in Allentown, and with his mother raising the children.

"Before Keith was even a year old," recalled Keith's mother, Joan, "he used to sit on his dad's lap after supper just drawing some gobbly-goo with crayons he'd been given. Then, later, his father, who was very good at drawing cartoon things, would show Keith how to draw circles. Then, he'd make a circle into a balloon or an ice-cream cone or make a face out of it, and put ears on it or make all kinds of animals. And that's how it all started." From the first, Keith's art teachers in Kutztown were astonished at the boy's obsessive love of drawing. Said one, "With him it was an inborn thing." Another said, "Keith loved line. Anything that lent itself to line pattern, he loved. He worked so intricately! The way the pattern would carry through and around and in and out was just extraordinary. He had such imagination!"