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- I was sort of in New York at exactly the right time

and exactly the right place.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

Wherever you are is the center.

But I can be in more than one place at the same time.

Things seemed to really be happening fast.

- He was born face up instead of face down,

which the doctor called sunny side up.

I guess I should have known right then

that something was gonna be up, huh?

- I grew up in a really small town in Pennsylvania

called Kutztown, which is northeast of Philadelphia.

I grew up learning to draw from my father

from about the time when I was four years old,

and my father used to entertain me

by making small drawings for me.

And I think the biggest impression that it had

was that instead of teaching me to copy

other cartoon characters or comics,

he wanted me to invent my own characters.

- We had a game where we'd see how good we could do

drawing with your eyes closed.

Which is a good practice for getting the rhythm

of your hand and knowing where your hand is

and what it's doing

without watching, without seeing it.

The hand is very strong, very unique,

and it's like a musician

who has a particular musical signature

that even with a few bars you know it's somebody's voice,

you see just a few lines of Keith,

you know it's his hand.

Different kids I guess get together

to do different things.

When you think about it, I had friends that got together

with their peers to play basketball.

I had friends that got together to play cards.

We got together to draw.

- I was really obsessed with Walt Disney a lot.

I loved Walt Disney.

I watched cartoons all the time.

- I think we had a fascination with all kinds

of genre, if you will.

And we were taking it pretty seriously.

I mean, at that time, we were fully aware

of who Picasso and all these guys were.

We were aware of the work that they did.

We were aware of how many pieces Picasso

had created in his lifetime.

And I don't think we were 10 years old.

He was always drawing,

so it was kind of a continuous evolution.

So I always knew he was good at it.

I always knew he could draw

and do artwork as well as my dad,

and was always a little jealous of that fact,

because I couldn't.

- At about 12, I started delivering newspapers,

and I started a newspaper route

which I delivered everyday, including Sundays.

Everyday after school, and on a bicycle usually.

And this was also actually probably interesting

because it meant that from 12 until 16,

which is 1970 to 1974,

everyday I was reading the front page

of the newspaper.

And this was during the end of the Vietnam War,

and into Watergate.

And Sundays it was also

then maybe one of the first times when I became

or had another thing that made me close to my father

was because on Sundays the newspapers are very thick

because the comics and all these other sections.

So Sunday mornings I would deliver them

with my father every Sunday morning,

we were waking up at six or seven in the morning,

or how early we'd get up so that we could

- deliver the papers-- - Together.

- And get done in time to go to church

and come home and have breakfast and go to church.

- We grew up in a family that went to church every week,

and because we were quite active, Keith and I,

and my younger sister Karen, in the youth group,

that gave us an opportunity

to really figure out where religion

maybe had a meaning to us in our lives.

I went to church camp for many years,

and we'd encouraged Keith to go,

and then the girls all went too.

There was one of the first times

that he met people from the city.

Black people.

Mostly blacks, which we didn't have in Kutztown

at that time.

And he got to know people from Philadelphia,

which was this big city far away.

- There was a couple years towards the end of high school

that I just thought he was really sort of

running around with the wrong kids.

That was a tough time.

It wasn't until he was in about 11th grade

when he started hanging out with some,

hanging out, so to speak, with some guy in his class

that we really didn't like.

- I had three sisters that were younger than me,

and one of them was much younger,

and she was born when I was about 10.

So I would really spend a lot of time with her

when I was growing up,

and spent a lot of time drawing with her.

I had no judgment of him.

I was an infant.

There was no way that I was going to be

trying to categorize him as being

a good boy, or misbehaving in school.

So I had no opinions formed of him,

and he could make a connection with me

that was direct.

- I think at that time, he probably was smoking pot.

Kutztown was a really small town,

so because I was not,

I didn't really fit in

to what the rest of the normal kids were like,

but as I got a little bit older,

I always used to leave

and hitchhike, and by the time I was 18,

and was allowed to leave school and leave my parents,

the first thing I wanted to do was get out

of that little town.

And a time it could have been worse.

I think this one's a write-off,

and that one is not good.

What about this one?

That one's okay.

- I didn't mind those little--

- Oh, that one's not the right color.

Oh it was?

Oh, I thought he'd done that as well.

No that was

from dripping it while the orange was still wet.

That one's all right.

Oh, don't throw that away though.

I really like it.

- In senior high school he had an art teacher

who was really good, and he devoted more time to art.

He got an honorable mention,

and he got $100.

And he was so proud of this.

It was his first money that he got

from anything, for any of his drawings.

And he said okay, I won $100,

and I'm gonna use that $100, and he paid his first

down payment to go to school in Pittsburgh.

- After high school, I went to a commercial art school

in Pittsburgh for six months,

because at that point, my parents were still

convincing me that I would never

make any money being an artist,

and if I really wanted to make a living,

I'd have to do commercial art.

So I went to this commercial art school,

on my own savings, really,

from being a paper boy, whatever,

and after six months realized that

no matter what, I didn't want to do that.

I was going to school in Kutztown,

and I was good friend with Kermit Oswald,

and Kermit and Keith were childhood friends.

Kermit bought a studio down by his house,

and we used to hang out there,

that was like the hang out.

And Keith would come and visit

from wherever he was,

traipsing around, following the Grateful Dead.

And Keith would stop in,

and that's when I first met him,

and he could always draw like a son of a gun.

When I started making film in school,

in like '78, '79, the Sony camcorder that I worked with

weighed 95 pounds, and it took 24 hours to charge it

to shoot 30 minutes of tape.

Reel to reel.

No cassettes.

This goddam thing was like a backpack.

You'd put it on your back,

you're like oh my god, where are we going?

Not far, I hope.

The thing weighs a ton.

- When I was 20, I had my first one man show in Pittsburgh.

While I was there, there had also been an exhibition

of Pierre Alechinsky in the museum,

which at that time had a really big influence on me

because it was the first time that I had seen

an older artist who had done an entire body of work

that in some ways was very similar

to the things that I was starting to do,

even though I was 20 years old,

there was something very common that I had

with his work, and it gave me the confidence

to think that maybe I was on the right track,

and I was doing something that was worth taking seriously.

This is very vivid in my memory,

that he stood in the kitchen and explained to my parents

that he could not be in Pittsburgh anymore,

that he had to be in New York.

It was a big decision.

Our son was going off to the big city.

I mean, Pittsburgh was a big decision.

I remember I cried and cried when he left.

But New York City, wow.

I first met Keith in 1978.

It was probably my first week at school,

at the School of Visual Arts.

I heard this Devo music,

and there was Keith in his room,

and he was painting to the beat

all these black lines,

and he was kind of painting himself into the corner.

The first class was drawing

and the teacher said okay, everybody choose a partner

and draw each other.

And Keith just sort of came and sat and drew me.

We actually had some classes together

that we were taking at SVA.

One of the classes with Bill Beckley

was in semiotics.

And that I think was kind of interesting

for both of us.

I've learned from semiotics

in choosing to repeat certain things

in their repetition they gain importance

and significance and turn into something else,

turn into a different kind of sign.

- I first met Keith at School of Visual Arts in 1978.

And I remember looking at his sneakers,

and his legs, and I thought he was a funny

really funny guy.

He was in my class,

and then we became really good friends.

And I used to cook spaghetti,

and he used to come to eat spaghetti all the time

to my house.

Th!

Th!

Th!

Five.

Five.

One, two, three, four, five.

It's great to be alive.

Five.

Al.

Al.

Al.

Alex, you'd better erase that.

That's how I met Keith,

while he was a student at School of Visual Arts,

he came to help me as an assistant.

He and his friend Kermit Oswald came to help,

to prepare exhibitions, paint walls,

and install things, and take things down, of course,

and wrap and pack.

You know, as you get ready for a show,

you need some preparation, of course.

But also along with that came

a number of their friends

who helped in the opening, for example.

Either the bar, and various things like that.

So I met his whole circle of friends,

which was very interesting.

And that's how I met Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example,

and Kenny Scharf, and so on.

So there was already a group of friends

who were very close together,

and Keith was at the center of it,

you might say.

We needed a place to live,

so we just decided we'd get a place together.

And he found one.

It was just a total rat trap.

I mean, I never saw rats,

but everything else.

They called it a two bedroom.

It was like, I had a bedroom,

and Keith lived in the closet.

And it was like, literally the size

of a sleeping bag.

And he had a stereo, and he just played the B-52's nonstop

24 hours a day for the entire time we lived there.

One of the things that started

becoming really interesting in a way

that I was combining what was going on at night

and what was going on in school

was that the subject matter of many of the drawings

that I was doing, because I was still doing

these abstract shapes, but I started being

completely obsessed with doing phallic little,

I mean, the calligraphy became completely phallic.

Partly really consciously as a way of asserting

my sexuality, and forcing people to deal with it,

and so I consciously flaunted the fact

that I was interested in dicks, because I could.

- And we found each other at the club Baths

across the street, which was the notorious bath house.

We ran into each other there,

and that's when we both figured out we were gay,

since we were both at the bath house.

And he was there all the time,

and I was there all the time.

Sin.

Fag.

Devil.

- No. - No.

Sin.

- Boys. - Art.

- Sin. - Art.

- I remember going to the New St. Mark's Baths

on a Saturday night,

and just thinking like, god, this must be like

what Rome was like, you know?

All these beautiful, healthy men,

gay men, doing whatever they wanted with each other.

It was like gay paradise.

- Almost immediately upon my arrival in New York

I had begun to be interested in

and intrigued by, and fascinated by the graffiti

that I was seeing on the streets.

And so it became sort of an event for me

to take the subways.

We were just walking around together.

He would see a graffiti painting with a cartoon,

and I remember Keith would just go man,

look at that, look at that.

That should be in the Whitney.

That should be in the Museum of Modern Art.

And Keith was just like,

just totally happy,

we were absorbing it all.

It was like, look, look!

Look at that.

Oh that tag, I've seen that kid.

I was like oh yeah, that's so and so.

He became really good friends with that crew

of graffiti writers.

He would later meet LA too,

who then he would collaborate with.

They had a very special relationship.

And LA was very successful.

There was almost like a gift from heaven

the way Keith found him,

and really was very equitable

in terms of giving him his share of the money,

because some of Keith's first major exhibits

at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery and whatever,

there would be many pieces that he would collaborate on

with LA too.

The city became a canvas,

and in many ways, a lot of the younger artists

were living off the fumes of graffiti art.

The artists themselves within the art world

took a lot of those strategies,

a lot of those expressions,

a lot of the semiotic abbreviations,

the ways of signing, the ways of creating

different identities, the forms of trespass

and intervention and public art,

and worked it into their own language.

And Keith would probably be one of the best examples

of somebody who really understood the spirit of graffiti.

- I guess the most noted painting that I made

in terms of subway graffiti

was whole subway car painted with Campbell's soup cans.

It was a homage to Andy Warhol.

It was also a message that I was sending

to people throughout New York City.

The message was that I am aware of modern art,

of pop art, of the culture, and the art of making art

in the art world, and it was also a message

that we as graffiti artists were not just the animals,

the wild dogs, the savage beasts,

the way we were depicted in the press at that time.

- Most artists waited to see what was their opportunity.

Where could they show their work?

Where could they sell the work?

Who was there to see the work

and considered to be interesting?

So there was a lot of waiting around, unfortunately.

Keith was never like that.

Immediately he set to work.

Wherever he had his own programs

of things he'd be doing.

In fact, rather than the artists, or Keith Haring,

or anybody else bugging Wanda over this,

wanted to show his work to me.

I had to ask him time and time again

curiously, what was it that he was doing?

Keith had a lot of different jobs.

Oh yeah, he was busboy down at Seteria,

he worked for Mr. Shafrazi, cleaning glasses.

We worked in nightclubs as well.

We all got jobs in the nightclub,

the Mud Club, and Club 57,

doorman, bartending, go-go dancing.

Keith was very connected

and was a big part of a little club

called Club 57 on 57 St. Mark's Place,

and Keith would put together little group shows

and stuff for all the friends.

When I was in the East Village,

I was friends with lots and lots of artists

because I used to organize shows.

At this club called Club 57

for 100 artists at a time.

- Actually, I had the first art show at Club 57.

It was called Celebration of the Space Age.

And I got this job as the style editor

of the Soho News.

It was kind of a radical downtown weekly.

So I was kind of always looking for stories

and what was new and happening.

But I used to go to the Mud Club every night,

but someone told me about Club 57,

so I checked it out

and it blew my mind.

Mud Club was more serious.

Actually, it was different drugs,

because Mud Club was very more heroin,

so everybody was all more depressed,

and more down, like that.

And Club 57 everyone was drunk

and doing whatever.

It was more like a ridiculous crowd.

It was like our clubhouse.

I was one of the, I was the big mouth funny guy.

- Three quarters of you have slept with him.

Again, this is John Sex.

This group of art students,

it was this very unusually brilliant crowd of kids.

Ann Magnuson, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf,

Tseng Kwong Chi, John Sex,

and they had this huge creative wild thing going on.

Every night was a different theme.

There was art shows, there was music,

there was poetry, performance, movies.

And it was basically, it really was a youth club

in a way I guess for avant garde

bohemian East Village kids.

I think we should do something

about the goldfish in India.

Sex was constant, everywhere.

With everybody.

It was a rolling orgy, practically.

I mean, some people were gay.

Some people were bi.

Was there anyone straight?

There was like two straight people.

Drugs, sex, rock and roll.

We were young.

We were like 19, 20 years old,

and we were loose in the city,

and we were just really having a good time.

And the city was our playground.

And everything was for us to taste

whatever we wanted to taste.

We were free.

This was Manhattan.

You know, it was before AIDS.

What is this preoccupation with the war?

Who really cares?

- It was the Reagan era, so we just gave up.

Basically.

- When Reagan started, of course we all went

on a campaign against Reagan.

- We were so shocked that this could ever even happen,

that a right wing Republican actor

could become president,

it was just shocking to us.

It was a subculture.

We were like apolitical.

Anti-political.

I mean, Keith was pissed off,

because Keith is, he had a conscience, or something.

I just wanted to have fun.

He was pissed off.

So he did all the word pieces about Reagan,

and the Pope.

- He used to cut up the New York Post things,

playing with words, and paste it all over the city.

And also in a more direct neighborhood,

politics was, all the East Village,

they all used to wear, the queens,

the gay guys and stuff, they used to wear the beard.

And he made a whole movement,

it was gay men against facial hair.

And he had the stencil, and he stenciled

all over the city.

Well, that's politics.

So a sick society invented psychiatry

to defend itself against the investigations

of certain visionaries

whose faculties of divination disturbed it.

Infinite belongs to us.

- Keith was living at the time in a little room

on 12th Street, and I was like, Keith,

you need to have some more space,

so come up and share this loft with me.

That was the start of us being roommates.

The loft was two stories, two floors,

and Keith had one area upstairs,

and Kenny had another area.

And Keith's area was absolutely immaculate.

I mean, it was just genius.

It was completely tidy.

There was a little bed rolled up in the corner.

There was a little rack for magazines.

And then there were two perfectly positioned chairs,

just exactly where you would like them to be

so that when you went in

you felt like sitting down and talking to him.

Samantha was just a beautiful girl.

Sam and I were kind of a couple,

and we love Keith, and so the three of us

we would have breakfast together,

we'd lie in bed together.

Kenny's area was completely different.

Kenny's area was complete chaos.

Paint everywhere, fluorescent paint everywhere,

toys everywhere, things glued to the walls,

cigarette packets glued to the walls.

Everything was significant.

But the division in thinking was hysterical.

Anyway, it was really fantastic,

them living together, actually.

One of my early performance pieces

when I was at the School of Visual Arts

was this videotape I did

which I also performed live a few times,

was called, it was a piece dedicated to my father,

and the whole thing was just me talking

in Morse Code, interspersed with me stopping

and explaining that my father used to like

the Morse Code, like da-da-da-da.

My father, my father's into ham radio.

My father, my father, always used to, always used to tell me

tell me, this, this is Morse Code.

This, this is Morse Code he said.

He said this, this is Morse Code.

- We would call him almost on a weekly basis,

on a Sunday, just to see how things were going.

He would tell us that he some work

that he put in a show at Mud Club,

and I guess he was actually running the shows

at Mud Club.

Didn't make sense to us.

Didn't understand what Mud Club was.

Didn't understand what these other clubs were.

I liked seeing myself from the back.

That was one of the first things that amazed me.

Because you never,

- you have no idea-- - You never get

to see your back.

You never get to see it.

That is weird.

- Okay, let's get ready for supper!

- When Keith was a student at the School of Visual Arts,

he had a couple of assignments

that ended up being brought home.

He somehow managed to get the school

to lend him a video camera

for what must have been a weekend

when he came home.

The thing I remember about the video taping

was that he wanted me to sit in this chair

in our living room and read a book backwards.

And I was supposed to be very serious about it.

End the jump

one in earth

to went he so.

Either there sun any have not did but ...

I really don't even remember

how the subway drawings first started.

I remember when I started,

but I don't really remember why,

except that I had noticed

one of the empty black panels,

and it just seemed to be the perfect place

to have a drawing.

So I went above ground, bought a piece of chalk,

and went back down and did it.

Go on, get out of here!

I'm calling the cops!

Give me a break.

Drawing in the subway always had a kind of element

of fear of the unknown, because you always had to be

prepared to get arrested, to get caught,

and getting locked up for a few hours.

You can see him, but I'll hold on

and I'll get back to you.

- You're under arrest for graffitiing the subway.

Get this on film.

You actually locking him up?

It didn't happen that often.

Most times cops would just give you a ticket

and let you go.

But there was always that edge to it,

because you never know which kind of cop

is gonna catch you.

The reason to keep doing it was

that you were immediately seeing the effect

of what you were doing, and you were immediately

seeing the power of this thing

to communicate and to actually touch people

and stop them in their tracks, et cetera.

The main thing with him was that

his animated motion took him straight from bed

shower in the morning into the street

and the street became a place to work,

and the street led to the subways,

to the place of transportation.

So the world of active population of people moving

was a ready-made audience, ready-made museum for him,

and for him it was very important

because he realized he knew that 80, 90%

of these people never went to a museum.

So he wanted to bring the museum to them.

Who are you doing it for?

For everybody, I guess.

I don't get paid to do it,

but I do it down here so lots of people can see it.

Here, you want a button?

This is my signature.

Okay.

Thank you.

- I've got letters and stories from people

of specific times when they came upon a drawing

and it filled this gap that was waiting to be filled.

It made something make sense

it made it a moment for them

which will stay in their memory forever.

That's what all art is supposed to do.

- He was so sophisticated that he could actually be simple

and appeal to children and people who were not

in the art world, as well as intellectuals.

- There were so many other things happening

in the art world and in the streets,

everything happening exactly at this one point

that I was becoming so active

in all these other things

that the Fine Arts chairman eventually just,

when I came back to enroll for the third year

to pick classes she told me that

maybe there was nothing else that they could do for me

because they couldn't give me credit

for all these other projects I was doing,

and she said maybe you should just,

maybe you should try to be an artist

instead of a student.

So at that I was like oh yeah, what a great idea.

- I introduced Keith to Jean-Michel.

I guess we became kind of known

as the three, I wouldn't say Musketeers,

but we were, each one had our own identity

of different from each other,

but very street-oriented,

and with a strong, kind of a competition.

A healthy competition.

Keith and Jean-Michel took off earlier than I did.

In the beginning, when I started,

when I first started selling work,

I was determined to not be with a gallery

and to learn everything myself.

And I started selling things

myself out of my studio.

And after about two months,

I decided I never, ever wanted to see the person

who was my graffiti again

because it drove me crazy.

It was taking off.

People were coming over our shared space everyday.

And basically I remember oh my god

this is great, Keith is bringing all these people in.

They're gonna see my art, too.

So I had all my things all over the wall.

And I just, I'll never forget,

they would walk past my art like it wasn't there.

And I was just like, but wait a second!

What about me?

And it was really hard.

And I remember Keith felt a little bit bad.

He called me up and he's like

I got this show at Shafrazi.

I'm like, you did?

We stood out.

People could always tell.

Oh, you must be Keith's family.

You're the only people here

who aren't dressed completely in black,

or who don't have pink hair.

And we went up, and we were very proud,

and then he still didn't sell anything at first.

And then he started making some things

that were more, that people could put in their homes.

There were people who were gonna pay

what to us were unbelievable sums of money

for his work, even in those early days.

To go from being a bicycle messenger

to be selling a painting for $10,000

seemed like this extraordinary amount of success.

One time I went to his studio

and he said do you want some money?

And I said why?

And he's like here!

He had like hundreds of dollars in cash.

And we were like what, did you rob a bank?

And he said no, this lady came here

and she wanted to buy everything,

and I didn't have anything to buy,

and she saw all those things in the garbage,

and so I sold it,

and say I want this, but this I'm throwing in the garbage.

I don't care, I'll buy it.

- As soon as money was introduced into the picture,

it changed everything.

All of a sudden, everybody was like

oh, we have to make money.

We have to compete.

It changed the whole thing,

that before that, it was art was only for art,

and it was all for each other,

we were performing and doing everything

for each other, and working off each other.

And then all of a sudden the outside world came in

with all the money.

What happened was a lot of people

including me, was like oh shit,

I need to, I'm gonna be left behind.

I needed to find somebody to move in,

so Keith moved in.

We shared a flat for a couple of years.

- During this time, again I continued having

searching for something and someone

and becoming very frustrated that I don't have

a lover by this point, and I really at this point,

I'm really tired of only doing the baths.

And so I finally meet Juan Dubose.

I run into him, and have great sex,

and just decide that this is probably

the right person to me.

He's black, he's really thin.

He's the same height as me.

His dick is the same size as me.

He's almost the same age as me.

He'd been out,

and he had met Juan at a club or something,

and he was waiting for Juan to call,

and there he was, he was sitting on one of the chairs,

and the room was absolutely immaculate,

and in front of the chair on the floor

was the telephone.

And I came in, and I was very, very quiet,

and I thought what's going on,

because normally it was music and stuff.

I went in and I said what are you doing?

And he said I'm just waiting for a phone call.

And then, he waited and he waited and he waited.

And I think it took Juan two days to ring,

and then finally the phone rang.

And it was Juan.

And he was a great love.

- Keith became an instant star within the first year.

By '82, we went to Japan,

they were lining up to come to see him.

It was like the Beatles had arrived.

- What are some of the other countries

that you have done some work in?

All over the world, really.

Germany, France, London.

South America.

Japan.

Holland.

Spain.

And around the United States.

- I'm Brazilian, so first Kenny came to Brazil,

and that's how he met his wife.

We were on the plane together

going to Carnival.

I get back from my trip to Brazil

and I announce hey everybody

I'm having a baby!

And they were like, you crazy?

And I mean, I was crazy a little bit.

I thought, hey I'm 24 years old.

I'm a grown man.

I was a kid.

I think there's a lot of things

about art that have a lot to do with healing

that a lot of people haven't really

scientifically explored, but I think it's definitely

helpful for children to be around art,

especially when they're around a hospital situation

so they feel more comfortable about being there,

but also just thinking positive,

about everything, it's a part of healing

and feeling better.

He always wanted children,

and he loved children.

And I remember him saying please,

please have a baby with me.

And I was just sort of like you must be joking.

I felt, in a way, that my having Zenna

was a little bit of a gift to Keith

because I don't know if I thought it so much

consciously, but maybe unconscious,

subconsciously, I thought this is gonna help

our family, and Keith became a godfather.

And Keith was really wonderful to her.

When I was drawing in the subway

sometimes you'd do 30 drawings

in a manner of three hours or something.

So I didn't want to keep doing

the same thing over and over,

so you'd invent something on the spot.

I mean, that's one reason why I really like

working with children more than anything else,

because they still really have that freedom

and that imagination to just do it.

- I suppose even just from the time I was a little kid

I had this tremendous guilt

from learning all the things

that white people had done.

The more I learned, the more I learned about everything,

from whether it was what they did during World War Two

to Japanese people in California,

putting them in camps, to what they did to Indians,

to the whole civil rights movement.

I felt a much closer affinity

to culture and people of color

than I did to white culture.

Who I was in the 80s

was Donald Mattern, which was my original name.

And I had changed it when I started deejaying.

It came about, I just wanted to give up my identity

from coming from Lancaster Pennsylvania.

So I changed it to Junior Vasquez.

Keith told me that he never really felt white inside.

I never felt I was anything else on the inside.

I did an evening at the Kitchen

which was an evening of collaborations.

And the idea was to collaborate with people,

with dancers, musicians, and artists.

And Keith was that artist.

Keith and I did a piece which was called

I believe Long Distance.

No music.

Just the sound of his brush,

He understood when I said

I think it should just be my body,

its rhythms, and your brush strokes.

And I think he liked the idea.

It was something virtuosic and beautiful

and musical in the way in which he did paint,

and that was something that we'd both exploited

in that moment.

Long Distance.

- At the time that I started working for him,

he was really interested and involved

with the hiphop scene,

and he was at that time seeing quite a bit

of his friend Madonna.

He hung around with Grace Jones.

He also stayed close to his friends

from his earlier days in New York from SVA,

Tseng Kwong Chi, Kenny Scharf, Tony Shafrazi

through the gallery was around a lot.

Keith was traveling a lot of the time

but he would make sure to take the plane

and arrive on Friday night

to be at the weekend for the Paradise Garage.

Music was phenomenal.

The music, Larry Levan, was the person

that was deejaying there

and was a kind of god.

I've never been the same

since entering that club for the first time.

You see the Paradise Garage

originally opened as a gay club.

I had some friends that I grew up with in Brooklyn

that were not gay that had started to go to this club,

and I was like man, isn't that a gay club?

And they said well no, Friday night is really mixed.

There's gay people, but there's straight people,

and there's really hot girls.

And if the girls see that you're not homophobic,

then that's cool.

- Keith was much more interested in my boyfriend,

Javier, this very beautiful Puerto Rican boy,

than he was in me.

And he made it really clear that he wanted

to get to know Javier,

and really was kind of rude to me.

Putting his back right in my face,

and just talking to Javier,

and I was fine.

- The sound system, you would hear from when you got

on the block, you would hear this deep base,

like it was amazing, because nothing, nothing, nothing

sounded anything like the Garage sound system,

then or now.

- I had started going to the Paradise Garage.

And that's where I had met Adolpho

which was Keith's assistant at the time.

Paradise Garage, Larry Levan,

and Keith Haring, it was a threesome.

Because the place reeked of Keith Haring.

His art was all over the place

for almost the whole time it was open.

It was just that whole blend of the music,

and Keith, what he did,

and what that had created,

and that Keith was the forefront

of our culture at that time.

And I was at many parties

and things with Keith,

and I was friends with friends of his,

Martin Burgoyne, who had been Madonna's roommate,

who had died of AIDS.

I was best friends with Martin,

Martin was best friends with Keith.

So again, it was a very small group,

a very small scene.

I was on the outskirts, because I was younger than them

and just coming up as a photographer.

His own birthday, which is May 4th,

was the occasion for him to throw

an enormous party at whatever at the time

was his most favorite nightclub.

He decided that he would name this party,

he would actually call it the Party of Life.

- One night we went to the Paradise Garage,

and it was the first night that Madonna appeared in public.

Who was this girl?

And I turned to Arnie, and I said

what's the big deal?

And Keith said Andy said she's gonna be

the biggest thing ever.

You see.

And I said oh right, right, right.

I mean, I make lots of things

that are permanent, or semipermanent materials,

usually paper, or metal and plastic, wood, vinyl.

But I like the idea of things

lasting longer than you last.

Being somewhere where lots of people

can see it for a long time.

I encouraged him to address the idea

of how could he make something more permanent

with paintings, and thereafter that followed

so he came up with the solution

of painting on tarps.

And he purposely chose tarps,

which are industrial things,

which are used in the back of trucks,

with the holes and the grommets,

so that they hold down so that all the goods

they were carrying across borders

and traveling again, very much it would travel.

It's something very important,

even Jack Kerouac talks about it.

Very important, that idea of nomadic life of travel.

- Keith had an interest in celebrities, certainly,

and I guess in some ways even in his own fame

or the hope that he would eventually be

a well-known person, the phone calls that we would get

from New York would be slowly peppered

with more and more references to people he had met.

He started throwing some names around

about meeting certain people.

And in fact, I think when he first said

that he met Andy Warhol,

I had to ask my wife, who's Andy Warhol?

Well, Andy was our hero.

He was the whole reason why we moved to New York.

He was just everything.

He was like god, king, you know?

I mean, the first time I had seen Andy,

the very first time I saw him,

probably was sitting in a coffee shop

near the museum out on 53rd Street,

and I was, I wanted to go in and say something,

but I had no idea what to do,

and sort of just walked back and forth

in front of the coffee shop several times

and decided that was ridiculous, and left.

- Hi. - Oh hi.

How are you?

He really was our inspiration.

And he opened up so many doors

as far as ways of thinking about art,

and ways of how art can be different

than just something on a wall in a gallery.

The first time I met Keith

was when Andy Warhol brought Keith Haring

to my apartment, because we were having

Sean's birthday, Sean, my son's birthday.

And Keith was carrying this big painting,

it was still wet, you know?

And it was for Sean.

And it had a face,

and a number, nine, to it.

Andy Warhol came to the exhibition

of Keith Haring that we had in 1982,

at Mercy Street.

Warhol would rarely be seen in the gallery

in an opening, but in this case,

not only did he come, but he was riveted.

And he became very close friends with Keith.

They were very good friends.

I think it was very important relationship

that Keith had with him.

They gossiped, they talked almost daily.

So what did you do last night?

- They'd get on the phone at the end of the night

and they'd talk like a bunch of old ladies.

It was just like the way they did it.

And in a way they were

these two little art world old ladies.

- Andy envied this enthusiasm that these kids had.

He envied the energy that they had.

In a way, he saw it as an extension

of what he was after,

and one aspect of what he was doing.

In fact, when Madonna got married, for example,

to Sean Penn, it was Keith Haring who was invited,

and Keith took as his date Andy Warhol.

So Andy wasn't invited.

And Andy liked that idea a lot.

We used to call him Papa Pop.

He was definitely a father figure.

Andy Warhol's work

was creating something

in a meaningful tradition,

but it was meaningless in a way.

And he liked the meaninglessness.

And Keith was creating something

that was looking like meaningless,

but actually was meaningful.

Andy Warhol took normal things

and made them into art.

But he wanted to do the opposite.

He wanted to make art normal,

to integrate it, to take it out

of this special kind of label.

In '85 I painted Grace

for two live performances at the Garage,

which is the second and third time

which I painted her.

And now ladies and gentlemen,

here's Grace!

- The strain on the relationship with Juan Dubose

reached a maximum in '85.

In the beginning of 1986

I meet Juan Rivera at Paradise Garage one night,

and I see this incredibly beautiful boy

who I think is the man of my dreams,

and I'm convinced that if he looks at me

and he talks to me that that is gonna be it,

and I meet him, and within a week

he's staying at the studio all the time,

and within two weeks, I'm inviting him

to come with me to Brazil where I'm going for a month.

Juan was the new love.

And then there was another beautiful Puerto Rican man

whose name was Juan Dubose.

Keith separated, and the other one is now the prince.

He's everywhere.

I think my parents have been pretty open

with the whole, you know, they may not have liked it,

but I think they accepted it well.

We didn't either know or want to accept

that they were boyfriends.

We called them bodyguards, or just friends.

- My family knew Keith's longer term companions very well.

They were implicitly accepted.

There was not a lot of discussion about this.

Some of them just by personality

didn't really integrate into our family

quite as closely,

but others really became close with my family

to the point where my mother

was making Keith's boyfriend scarves at Christmas.

At the very beginning he described him

as his bodyguard, which I thought

was really kind of cute in a way.

Of course this is at a time when,

the early 80s was, it's not like the present,

this isn't on the cover of magazines like it is today.

Hollywood wasn't dealing with it.

There wasn't television about this subject.

This was something that was still

very much in the closet.

My parents are pretty conservative

politically and socially.

But for them, that has always extended

to people have the right to do what they want

as long as they're not hurting other people.

- I would try to, like around relationships and so on,

I would try to pull him into adult conversation

about things.

This was hard with him.

Because his impulse, that was not impulse.

His impulse was to do the work

and to live the life.

- I've been approached by a man from a museum

in Berlin at the museum called

the House at Checkpoint Charlie

which is a museum that's dedicated

to human rights issues.

And he's asked me if I'm interested

in painting the Berlin Wall,

which of course I'm interested in painting.

I'm painting this continuous interlocking chain

of human figures which are connected

at the hands and the feet,

and they're alternating between red and black,

and yellow browns was the German colors,

and really about this, obviously, somehow,

about this unity of people,

and against the idea of the wall

which is separating the people.

I started buying work from Tony

and collecting Keith's work.

And I bought 30 pieces of Keith's,

and I just love it, because it really reminds me

of a time of living in New York

and growing up.

It's a very optimistic time,

and everybody thought art could change the world.

Hell no!

Hell no!

Hello no!

There was a sense once Keith Haring

got established in the art world

that he should change his methodology

and his approach to not just art making

but to the institutions and the market of art.

It's true that maybe the art community

especially the establishment, art establishment,

may not be that into Keith's work,

the reason being because he has done

so many works, probably.

Keith wasn't stupid.

He knew exactly what he was doing,

and on top of that, he had a lot of really smart people,

career-savvy people, advising him.

And they were telling Keith,

okay, now you stop making so much work.

There is a supply and demand going here.

You make bigger work.

You make a set number of work for a show in New York

every year, if you're really that prolific,

and you can do a show in Europe.

You can do your commissions.

But for goodness' sake,

stop drawing on every kid's black book.

Stop drawing on people's clothes.

Stop giving your work away for free.

He was extremely sensitive.

He had a way of being very giving.

When we were both invited to lunch

at a certain household,

and these people at the house was all children

and adults, all sort of thing,

would you please sign this, would you please sign this?

Keith was very, very accommodating,

but also instead of just signing his name,

which I would do,

usually all of us just sign our names,

because what else can you do?

There's so many people asking.

But he would do a drawing

for each one of them.

And I thought that was very generous of him,

because it's not like

a normal celebrity doing a drawing.

He's a very highly acclaimed

and demanded artist.

His images started really penetrating

people's consciousness, and so he began to notice,

and friends from all over the world

began to tell him, oh you know

they're selling Keith Haring T-shirts in Thailand.

You know, I saw Keith Haring sneakers in Berlin.

And I saw Keith Haring pants in Brazil.

- When Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1985

on Lafayette Street, it signaled a significant shift

in the way that youth culture was going to express itself.

- Keith really advanced what an artist could do.

Taking Andy Warhol's factory one step further

into an actual factory store.

When you look at what's come since then,

particularly Takashi Murakami,

taking Keith's approach perhaps even further,

maybe not so much conceptually further,

but pushing it more with a connection

with major merchandising companies.

- They misunderstood a lot of things that Keith did.

I mean, The Pop Shop they thought was a commercial endeavor.

He wasn't gonna get rich off of selling T-shirts

and blow-up pillows, and buttons.

This wasn't about money.

It was about accessibility.

And it was about him reaching people,

and it was about spreading the creative energy

that he had.

Partly at the prodding of Tony,

I've become interested in trying to do,

to translate some of my things

into large outdoor sculptures,

and into public sculptures.

And Tony has arranged through to

do an exhibition at Castelli Gallery.

He just insisted.

Okay, now this year I have a show in Paris,

and I have a show in Milano,

and I have a show in wherever,

and that's great, and I've got to produce all this work.

But I insist that when I go

to be present at my exhibition

in whatever country or city

I also want to do something lasting

and meaningful that will remain.

Something that will help people,

and something that brings joy.

And so that is why, even today,

in any number of cities around the world

there remain Keith Haring murals

because fortunately people value them

not for their art market value,

but for their spirit.

I do all kinds of things.

Sometimes they're temporary,

and sometimes they last forever.

There's a new museum that's just been built in Antwerp

and they asked me to do a permanent mural

inside the museum in the cafeteria, which I do.

And it's very beautiful staying in Belgium.

I spent three weeks in Knokke painting,

and I'm living while I'm there

inside of this house that has been made

by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely

on the property of the Nellens,

and in this enchanted house.

I'm living with his family and having an incredible time.

The idea of the circle.

I bind myself to exorcize myself

only in one way.

Beauty in a circle.

But beauty is not suddenly in a circle.

It comes with rapture.

A great deal of beauty is rapture.

- Things have seriously changed already in New York,

and in my life, but in New York in general,

because we've introduced this new horror of AIDS

which totally changed everyone's life,

and was affecting everyone's life by this point.

The first introduction of it was probably

as early as '82, starting to hear rumors

of these mysterious deaths of gay men.

Do you know the brother?

Poor brother, he is dead.

People have this idea about the 80's

as being so fantastic.

I was telling people no, the 80's were terrible.

AIDS arrived, and it wasn't called AIDS.

It was called gay cancer.

We didn't know what it was.

But that pretty much ended the fun.

It was horrible.

I mean, can you imagine being in your 20s,

and all your friends, and they're all dying?

Act up was the AIDS coalition,

Unleash Power was a political group

fighting to get the government to take notice

of the AIDS epidemic that was happening,

to get testing through the National Institute of Health,

NIH, get tests made faster.

There's so much bureaucracy in medical research

at that time.

And through the efforts of Act Up,

they changed the way the US government

was dealing with AIDS.

And it was a very creative way to protest.

When Keith was diagnosed with AIDS,

he became a big part of Act Up.

Now I fit exactly the classifications

of actually having AIDS.

So for the first time, it was a reality

that now it was gonna begin to happen to me,

and now I had to deal with it.

It's like I knew that it was gonna happen,

but somehow, it doesn't prepare you anymore

for that moment when you know that it's really,

it's hitting, I mean at first it was just,

you break down, whatever.

I went and sat by the river,

and just cried, and cried, and cried.

But then it's like, well you can't just,

well you have to go on.

You get yourself together, and you realize

that this is not the end right there,

and that there's other things,

and you gotta continue, and you've gotta figure out

how you're gonna deal with it,

and confront it, and face it.

- Yeah, I was probably one of the first people to know

that he was HIV.

Yeah.

It was a hard thing to swallow,

but again, it wasn't a,

it wasn't a surprise.

Like I just said, I mean these people were pretty crazy.

They were known to be pretty wild.

So when he came to me with that,

it didn't shock me.

Did we ever talk about it?

He did say to me I have so much to do.

I have so much to do.

And I remember once going into his studio,

and he was working feverishly,

and I was saying to him what's going on?

And he said I just have so much to do.

- When Keith did his article in Rolling Stone,

it was amazing how brave he was

to come out publicly.

Because no one else was doing that.

And I think he was shocked a little bit

by the parties invitations stopped.

I did see Keith, and he told me,

you know I'm sick.

It was overwhelming, but what made it

not as bad as you would think

was the way he just was dealing with it.

The way he said, you know, I'm just gonna

get the right treatment, and eat right,

and boom, boom, boom,

and he really managed it in a very heroic,

and a courageous way.

- He looked at me, and he said there's something

I want you to do for me.

And it was like, how many times he had said that

to me, by this point in our lives, like thousands.

Something I need you to do.

I'd be like, okay what?

Well, I need you to tell my parents

that I have AIDS.

And I was floored.

I mean, I was absolutely,

like.

And I think it took me a second or two

to say okay, I'll do it.

It's not a problem.

We talked about whether or not

art came from within,

or came through from some other place.

And you were just a vehicle, in a sense,

of this energy coming,

and you were just designated to get these things out,

and create these works for people to enjoy, or hate.

He exemplified what an artist should be.

- I started having more and more need

to be with intellectual companionship

to deal with the situation,

because it really required a lot of mental activity,

and talking about, and trying to figure out

exactly what was going on and what to do

with the situation, and I met this kid Gil,

who I fall madly in love with.

I never knew Gil so much.

And I found it peculiar,

that you would fall in love with a straight man.

Now, you can have friends,

but that cannot,

Keith was a very sexual person.

What did that mean, that you were in love

with a man who couldn't love you in that way?

No judgment.

- I was fortunate enough to travel with Keith

to many countries,

France, England, Belgium, Italy.

Morocco.

We would go to museums together.

If he could get away with it,

he would like to touch texture,

not only visual, but actual touching.

- I also have a problem going to museums,

knowing, trying to decide between looking

at the paintings or cruising,

because museums are some of the cruisiest places

in the world, I think.

I'm supposed to be really interested in this painting,

but the power of a hot body

can still overpower that, so in some ways,

it might be the, I mean it's probably one of

the strongest forces.

- Keith met Piergiorgio and Roberto Castellani

on the streets of New York.

And from that meeting,

developed an invitation

to come to the city of Pisa

which also has quite a well-known landmark already.

And he was asked, this contemporary artist,

this gay artist, this very young artist,

this artist who had HIV, was invited to paint a mural

on the outside of a church!

He wanted to set up a foundation

to carry out and to continue

the kind of charitable work

that he had done all his life.

He started to really focus

on what he wanted to leave as a legacy.

Let's just pretend you get hit by a cab.

Let's just go that route, Keith.

I know you don't want to talk about this,

but you're throwing this whole foundation thing

on all of us, and there's a certain amount of stuff here

that I feel like I needed to know.

It was a little bit like pulling teeth

at the same time.

Not a conversation that you really want to have.

- He was in Germany at the end of January 1990.

He died on February 16th 1990.

He didn't stop.

He did not stop.

There was no one, I can't imagine anyone

being able to do as much work as he did

in that short period of time.

It was incredible.

He was like a superman or something.

Now he's cremated,

and we had to fight for the,

we had to struggle or fight for the ashes.

Found out in an offhanded way

that you get cremated, and guess what?

It's actually disposed of with industrial garbage.

We created these two services,

two funeral services, that we had in the Kutztown area.

One was in a church that his family participates in,

and the second service, we ended up having

on the hillside where he used to go and hang out,

and meditate after school,

or maybe sometimes during school, I'm not sure.

I have a psychic side, you know.

So ghosts and spirits whisper to me.

- It was a sad day when we brought his ashes.

It was a rough day period.

But then Julia carried them up

in a plastic container.

And then she opened them

and handed them to me first.

At the hill, they were giving out

parts of the bones to people.

And I received it too.

The neat thing was in all the family

we all took some and let the wind take them,

and a flock of geese went over.

It was almost like a sign.

And I put it in my pocket.

And I thought what am I gonna do with it?

And suddenly Keith just whispered to me

saying keep it.

Hold it.

I'll tell you what to do.

So then okay.

It was a beautiful day though.

And when I think back on it, I can still look up

and see these clouds, and it was this incredible

Hollywood sky, and it was just,

it was a beautiful moment, when I think about it.

Kermit I think sprinkled them

in the shape of a crawling baby.

He took the ashes and sprinkled them out.

- And I ended up officiating this funeral service

for some of his closest friends,

and certainly Tony.

And I think the Scharfs, Kenny and his wife.

And Yoko Ono.

Yeah, that was a big doings.

When Yoko Ono was in Bowers.

I went home.

And Keith said that he would like me

to take it to Paris.

And put it

in the obelisk in front of the Ritz,

the Place Vendome.

I went to Paris,

and then Keith just came again

and said do it today!

The car was going to a gallery that we know.

And it sort of passed in front of Ritz,

and I said stop, stop!

I jumped out of the car.

And I just put it exactly where Keith said

I should put it.

To this day, I have,

it's somebody who is still,

to me, he's still present in my life.

Not only I have his artwork

all over my house,

not only my children still talk about him.

I tell stories of his to my children,

and not only talk to my friends about him,

still he's somebody very present.

- He would always tease me that I'd forget him.

That I would forget him soon after he passed,

and I can honestly say

that I have thought about Keith

every day since he passed.

Keith's alive everyday in my life.

Like I said, I see his stuff on people's chat,

the weirdest times, it's like it never stops.

It's like they say, is it art or is it God?

It's like Keith is still around.

I was sitting with him, and I held him,

and I said that I knew he could understand me,

that he could hear me.

And that he, everything was gonna be okay.

And his legacy

was gonna live on,

and it was just gonna grow.

And that he should just relax,

because he's just done amazing things,

and it was gonna continue.

And he calmed down.

His agitation stopped.

And I said I know you can,

you know what I'm saying.

And then he died.

Like a couple hours later.