From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Kara Q. Smith’s review of Keith Haring: The Political Line at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Smith notes that the exhibition “…offers the chance not only to appreciate the artist’s work and iconic imagery from multiple perspectives (albeit sometimes dizzying at this scale), but most importantly the chance to bring new context to the work.” This article was originally published on January 20, 2015.

Keith Haring. A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988; acrylic on canvas; 120 x 120 x 120 in. Courtesy of de Young Museum San Francisco. Collection of the Keith Haring Foundation. © 2014, Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring: The Political Line is a packed survey of work by the late artist—Haring passed away in 1990 from AIDS-related complications—organized by guest curator Dieter Buchhart and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s founding curator of photography and chief administrative curator, Julian Cox. The over 100 works in the exhibitions are grouped around political issues such as “Mass Media and Technology” and “Capitalism and Consumption,” pulling the viewer through the exhibition and broadly situating each packed room of works. Included, too, are various ephemera, Polaroid photographs, and drawings extracted from New York subway stations that historicize and contextualize Haring’s practice and motives, adding to the monumentality of the exhibition and demonstrating just how prolific and seemingly indefatigable Haring was in his thirty-one years of life.

Read the full article here.