Brad Gooch.
BRAD GOOCH: KEITH HARING BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE AND LINE OF KEITH HARING (2024)
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Keith Haring (born 1958) was an American artist whos work was inspired by the 1980s sub-culture of subway graffiti. His work involved sexual references which evolved into social activism promoting AIDS awareness and protected sex. He had many gallery exhibitions and also exhibited in prominent internations exhibitions including Documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, and the Venice Biennale. Haring studied commercial art at Pittsburgh’s School of Professional Art, and after moving to New York in 1978 he studied at the School of Visual Arts. He developed a widespread international career, with commissions from a variety of public bodies. For example he was commissioned by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin to produce a 980 feet long mural showing interlocking red and black figures agains a yellow background celebrating, in the colours of the German flag the coming together of East and West Germany.
Brad Gooch recounts Haring’s unusual and influential career, which ended in 1990 when, at the age of just 31, he died of AIDS-related illness at his apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs wrote: “Finding a chronicler with the proper combination of familiarity and detachment can be like going on a series of bad Hinge dates, but in Gooch, Haring has met his match. Radiant, referring to both Haring’s recurrent drawing of a crawling baby and his own fast-burning star, is a faithful retracing of his steps, with over 200 people interviewed or consulted: devoted and probably definitive . . . . [Gooch] is a poet, which shows in phrasing at once shrewd and evocative . . . . Gooch’s book insists readers slow down and consider the artist’s legacy.”
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Brad Gooch (born 1952) is an American writer living in New York City. His first book recounted his life living as a fashion model with his film-maker boy friend Howard Brookner in the celebrated Chelsea Hotel. Gooch is now married, with two children, to the religious activist Paul Raushenbush. In addition to his biography of Keith Haring, Gooch has written fourteen other books including a biography of the novelist Flannery O’Connor.
