Brad Gooch's Best Seller—Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Brad Gooch on the Life and Work of 80s artist, activist Keith Haring
1. Brad, please tell us how you became interested in the life and work of Keith Haring?
I sort of “Forrest Gumped” my way into this book. I was living in downtown Manhattan when Keith appeared in 1978 and lived in the East Village. I saw his work drawn on street corners, newsstands in SoHo, and then the subway drawings. I also crossed paths with him. It was hard not to. He was a scene maker in a scenic decade. He also gave money for the care of my lover Howard Brookner, when he was dying of AIDS later in the decade.
2. How did the book project about Keith Haring begin?
I had thought ever since the eighties of writing a novel about Keith Haring. Yet, when it came time that I might write that novel, I decided a biography was more fitting. His life and times were now history. You couldn’t necessarily assume everyone knew what Club 57 or the Mudd Club was; even young queer people no longer understood the impact of AIDS on the downtown community at that time. I thought it important to fill in that context. The Guinness-Book-of-Records facts of Keith’s ten-year comet of a career were so startling, I thought the subject called for that Gesamtkunstwerk of biography.
Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
3. What inspired Keith to become an artist?
His father was not only an ex-marine, but he was an amateur artist and cartoonist. He encouraged Keith’s drawing from age 4 on. He introduced Keith to Doctor Seuss and Walt Disney. Haring later said that the greatest artists of the 20th century were Picasso, Warhol, and Walt Disney.
4. What were Keith's early days like?
Keith arrived in New York in 1978 at age twenty and took to the streets. He came to go to art school, the School of Visual Arts, and to come out as a gay man. Art was happening on the streets, in the public art of Jenny Holzer and SAMO and other street artists, as well most notably on the subways, where the “Wild Style” of graffiti was at its peak. Keith wanted to find his way into all that energy and to turn his drawing line into a signature. He also was drawing lots of penises, reflecting his avid participation in the life of cruising bars and baths during a golden age of promiscuity.
5. Tell us about Keith's friendship with Basquiat?
Keith admired Basquiat’s SAMO works (done with Al Diaz) on the streets of New York from the moment he arrived and met him soon afterwards at SVA and Club 57. They both admired each other’s art. As their careers took off, they became sort of frenemies as they would clock each other’s works and careers and their similar trajectories from East Village street art to more global art stars. Keith gave a beautiful eulogy at Basquiat’s memorial service in 1988. “His images have entered the dreams and museums of the exploiters,” he said.
6. How did Keith meet Andy Warhol? What was their relationship like?
Warhol came to the closing night of Keith’s first show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. They were then brought together by Christopher Makos, the photographer. They had a close friendship and would often talk on the phone in the mornings to gossip about the social events of the night before. Warhol was also Keith’s mentor and role model as an artist, especially in his use of popular culture as material and his explorations of the shifting boundaries of business and art. Haring wrote that his art would not have been possible if Warhol had not gone before.
7. What legacy did Keith leave?
Keith had a big influence on a second generation. For KAWS, Bansky, Shepard Fairey, he was their Warhol, especially in his engagement with public art, activism, working on any surface, licensing, communicating, and building community. Haring’s art almost makes more sense now than it did when he was alive.
8. Tell us about Keith as an activist?
Activism is a through line in Haring’s life and art. He was always involved in issues of apartheid, racism. environmentalism, nuclear proliferation, gay liberation. He was active in messaging against the election and then re-election of Ronald Reagan, whose refusal to even utter the word “ADIS” or “gay” was an existential threat. He was an AIDS activist in both his later art (his “Silence = Death” paintings and poster), his coming out publicly as a PWA, a Person with AIDS in Rolling Stone magazine, and his participation in and significant donations to ACT-UP.
9. What will your next book be about, Brad?
I’m resting. Stay tuned.
UPCOMING BOOK EVENT
Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Thursday, August 15, 6pm Get Tickets: https://massmoca.org/event
About Brad Gooch:
Brad Gooch is a poet, novelist, and biographer, whose latest book is Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, published by Harper/Harper Collins in 2024. His previous books include:Rumi's Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love; Rumi: Unseen Poems (trans. Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz, Everyman's Library); Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & The 70s and the 80s; Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller; City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara; as well as Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America; three novels--Scary Kisses, The Golden Age of Promiscuity, Zombie00; a collection of stories, Jailbait and other Stories, chosen by Donald Barthelme for a Writer's Choice Award; a collection of poems, The Daily News; and Finding the Boyfriend Within and Dating the Greek Gods. His work has been featured in numerous magazines including: The New Republic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Travel and Leisure, Partisan Review,The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Art Forum, Harper's Bazaar, The Nation, and The Daily Beast. A Guggenheim fellow in Biography, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and a Furthermore grant in publishing from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. He lives in New York City.
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To read more from Brad Gooch, visit the Amazon website.
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