At the MoPOP exhibit, I felt I was inside Haring’s vermicular style, which has about it the experience of walking through Manhattan’s packed and winding streets by Charles Mudede It’s early October, and I’m in what is still the center of my whole world, Manhattan. This is the edge of the East Village. Here is East 14th Street. And there, on Avenue A, I first see a food truck that promises it can “Feed Your Soul.” But something else, something larger, catches my eye. I look up and find a giant mural of the Beastie Boys. The three old school emcees are posing b-boy style with a boombox.  “Posse in Effect,” by muralist Shepard Fairey, rises eight stories above Avenue A, only three blocks from the studio (171-A) where the Beastie Boys made their first record in 1982. This is 229 East 11th Street. Here, where presently a psychic and laundry do business, the Fun Gallery opened its doors in 1981.  See Keith Haring: A Radiant Legacy at MoPOP through March 23, 2025. Nick Elgar/Corbis/Getty Images It was the first art gallery in the East Village and showed artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring at their peak. But it also provided a point for hiphop, which featured Black and Brown artists, to intersect with a No Wave music, film, and art scene that was predominately white. The reason why the Beastie Boys switched from the punk music they recorded at 171-A to the hiphop recorded in 1983 for Rat Cage Records, “Cooky Puss,” is precisely this intersection.  The exhibit currently happening at the Museum of Pop Culture, Keith Haring: A Radiant Legacy, can only be understood in terms of this intersection. Haring, along with Fab Five Freddy, a graffiti artist, and Charlie Ahearn (the director of the greatest hiphop film on record, and a key figure in the formation of the Fun Gallery), participated in The Times Square Show, a 1980 exhibit that brought this intersection to a wider audience. In fact, that show marked the point when Haring left the art school world and entered the art of the streets and underground. Without this transition, his name would mean nothing to us today.  Haring’s genius extended to the politics of his time: The struggle for LGBTQ rights, the anti-nuclear movement, and AIDS activism. COURTESY OF MOPOP I visited Keith Haring: A Radiant Legacy the day before my trip to Manhattan. And what struck me immediately was its presentation. After passing the series of subway images, I felt I was inside Haring’s vermicular style, which has about it the experience of walking through Manhattan’s packed and winding streets: One section is devoted to his commercial works; you turn, walk, and find a set of Haring’s personal works; and another walk around leads you to a wall with a warning about the section’s explicit content. I stopped for a moment before the Icons Suite. It has the famous flying angels, the radiant baby on all fours, and, of course, the barking dog. The last of which recalled in my mind the opening of a cruelly neglected but groundbreaking hiphop track by Man Parrish, “Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop).” Around the time Haring was drawing barking dogs on black boards that, due to a deep recession, lacked advertisements in New York’s subway system (1982), “Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)” dropped, and we heard the sound of Haring’s dog: Barking at night. Barking at empty, dilapidated buildings. Barking at “broken glass everywhere.”  Walking through the exhibit feels like walking through Manhattan's packed and winding streets. COURTESY OF MOPOP Haring left Pennsylvania in 1978, not long after briefly studying commercial art at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, and settled in a city that was drawing white artists who decided to move in the opposite direction of their parents, from the urban to the suburban. This movement was not huge, but it was enough for interesting things to happen. New York City at the time was actually bankrupt and had been famously told to “drop dead” when it pleaded for federal assistance from Gerald Ford. The city, of course, wasn’t broke, but its public servants had powerful unions, and those in power used the city’s deficits to attack these municipal unions. This is what finally plunged the city into a depression that hit the poor like nothing else. Unemployment spiked, and property values collapsed. But that is only a part of the story.  At the very same time, Manhattan became the center of global capitalism. Its stock market began a supernova-like expansion that is still with us today. And so we have at once the poverty that’s captured in Ahearn’s Wild Style side by side with the boom in the markets we find in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. It is in this contradiction we find the meaning of the show at MoPOP. It could be called Keith Haring: A Radiant Legacy because the period opened by the devastation of New York City’s working classes was brief: From the mid-’70s to around the time Haring opened his Pop Shop, 1986. The door, as it were, opened almost as quickly as it closed. You had to make it within this period, make it while rent and life in the city were affordable. Gentrification, which closed the contradiction between Wall Street and the streets, was around the corner. A poor Basquiat or poor Haring could not afford to live in the East Village I visited in early October. Back then, you were condemned to move quickly, to make as much art as humanly possible. There was no room for rest. You had to be radiant. The show captures this intensity. From wall to wall, you sense the hurry, this race to the finish line. And we must associate this urgency not with the fact that Haring’s life was cut short by AIDS (he died in 1990 at the age of 31). Haring was on the move before being diagnosed with HIV in 1988. Even while attending Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, he was prolific. And the move from academia to the subway only accelerated his production. Haring at the Art Gallery of NSW, 1984 Stuart William Macgladrie / Fairfax Media via Getty Images Though A Radiant Legacy is impressive in its size and details concerning the artist’s spectacular rise to stardom and includes a note on Haring’s early but almost completely forgotten collaborator, LA II (Angel Ortiz), it still amounts to a blip of his tremendous output in the subway, in galleries, in magazines, album covers, music videos, on himself, on Grace Jones, and on walls around NYC and the world. But the show does give you a good dose of his genius, which extended to the politics of his time: The struggle for LGBTQ rights, the anti-nuclear movement, AIDS activism, and the anti-Apartheid movement, all of which are represented in Legacy.  My penultimate favorite part of the show, in fact, is a collection of lithographs in the Social Justice section known as the Free South Africa Suite. Made in 1985, the twilight of the Apartheid that educated Elon Musk, they depict, in Haring’s unmistakable cartoon manner, a small white person struggling with a giant Black person they have on a leash. Eventually, the white person gets stomped by a giant Black foot. And as they bleed on the ground, the leash, which has transformed into a snake, begins eating them. Nelson Mandela was released from prison five days before Haring died.  The ultimate piece of the show for me, however, turned out to be a thick slice of drywall from Haring’s Pop Shop, which opened in 1986 with the philosophy that art should be for everyone. True, there has been much debate about the affordability of the objects sold in this business, which marked the end of the road for the period that gave us the hyper-creative Manhattan we see in No Wave movies and hear in early Def Jam records. All that’s left of this remarkable time are murals, such as the one I encountered on an upscale East Village building, and exhibits like Legacy. Money ruins everything.  Keith Haring: A Radiant Legacy is on display at MoPOP through March 23, 2025.