Keith Haring's Line

Race and the Performance of Desire

Ricardo Montez

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781478009535
  9781478008606
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478012191
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

In the thirty years since his death, Keith Haring—a central presence on the New York downtown scene of the 1980s—has remained one of the most popular figures in contemporary American art. In one of the first book-length treatments of Haring's artistry, Ricardo Montez traces the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Haring's artistic practice and with which the artist marked canvases, subway walls, and even human flesh. Keith Haring's Line unites performance studies, critical race studies, and queer theory in an exploration of cross-racial desire in Haring's life and art. Examining Haring's engagements with artists such as dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, graffiti artist LA II, and iconic superstar Grace Jones, Montez confronts Haring's messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries, highlighting scenes of complicity in order to trouble both the positive connotations of inter-racial artistic collaboration and the limited framework of appropriation. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Call of the Impossible Figure
• 1. Desire in Transit: Writing It Out in New York City
• 2. “Trade” Marks: LA II and a Queer Economy of Exchange
• 3. Theory Made Flesh?: Keeping Up with Grace Jones
• 4. Drips, Rust, and Residue: Forms of Longing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index