Keith Haring

Dancing puppets, crawling babies and teeming animals are the ingredients of a gigantic work of art that well-known American graffiti artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) created especially for an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1986. The colorful 12×20-meter canvas was taken in hand by Haring with spray cans and fabricated on the museum floor in a single day. For many years, the artwork was on display under the glass canopy above the historic staircase. After a thorough restoration, the "velum of Keith Haring" is back on display at the Stedelijk.

From the streets into the museums
Keith Haring began doing graffiti on the New York subway in 1980. Soon he was exhibiting in galleries and museums worldwide, and in the late 1980s the Stedelijk Museum invited Haring for a major retrospective. "For me, it was an overwhelming experience, showing at the Stedelijk Museum. I felt I had really accomplished something". The themes in Haring's engaged art, such as war, racism, drugs and AIDS - the disease that killed Haring himself in 1990 - have always remained topical.