Keith Haring
Dog, 1986
Artwork Brief Description
Haring’s *Dog* is an iconic pop-art sculpture bursting with energy and symbolism. While its vibrant red and dynamic posture exude playfulness, the work also critiques power and authority. Inspired by Egyptian mythology, particularly Anubis, it challenges perceptions of obedience and resistance. As a queer artist and activist, Haring infused his art with messages of social justice, particularly for marginalized communities.
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s.His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his art in 1997.
Haring's popularity grew from his spontaneous drawings in New York City subways—chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images on blank black advertising spaces. After gaining public recognition, he created colorful larger scale murals, many commissioned. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, many of them created voluntarily for hospitals, day care centers and schools. In 1986, he opened the Pop Shop as an extension of his work. His later work often conveyed political and societal themes—anti-crack, anti-apartheid, safe sex, homosexuality and AIDS—through his own iconography.
Haring died of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990.
In 2014, he was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, a walk of fame noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields". In 2019, he was one of the inaugural 50 American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in
New York City's Stonewall Inn.
Keith Haring (American 1958-1990) Dog, 1986
Keith Haring’s “Dog” is one of the artist’s most well-known and important motifs and was the first sculpture to be placed in the Heller Garden. The bold, energetic lines and simplified, cartoon-like figure is incredibly “Pop” in appearance. For an animal it has a remarkably human aspect, depicted with its mouth wide open, whilst standing on its hind legs with its forelegs outstretched, giving the appearance of arms.
This figure, like many within Haring’s oeuvre, with its vibrant colours and dynamic shape, evokes a sense of primal energy and movement reminiscent of ancient glyphs or hieroglyphic-like symbols. Here, his anthropomorphisation of “Man’s Best Friend” recalls the Ancient Egyptian Anubis, the God of death, regeneration, and the afterlife, who took the form of a dog. Haring regularly repeated this subject in a number of paintings, drawings, and sculptures so that through his use of symbolism, his ideas could be easily read and understood by all.
His use of such a bright red is not without significance. Historically and across many cultures, it is a colour that has been associated with heightened strength, emotion, and power. It is a colour used for warning signs, and this particular shade of pillar box red, combined with the dog’s open posture, could not make that more clear. Surrounded by all the lush green ferns, the dog becomes even more striking and intriguing to the viewer. From one perspective, it appears to be dancing, and from another, it appears to be ready to give a human-style embrace.
From whichever angle we approach Haring’s creature, it is clearly a sculpture that is full of life and zeal. Despite this joyful energy that beams from this sculpture, an underlying trope of Haring’s art, particularly in his depiction of dogs, is to encourage viewers to question those who bark or shout the loudest. Haring’s short life was very much one on the periphery. He was homosexual, and he used his art, in particular his public art, to raise awareness for AIDS and drug abuse prevention. He had a marked scepticism towards socio-political authority, and he preferred to listen to the underdog and those often marginalised from public discourse. In contrast to the obedient nature typically associated with dogs, Haring’s artwork advocates for resistance and disobedience in the face of corrupt systems of power.