Called “Make Your Mark: A Keith Haring Workshop for Teens,” the program runs from 3 to 4 p.m. and invites participants ages 13 to 19 to study Haring’s art and then create their own pieces, experimenting with movement, color and a message of their own. Supplies are provided.
The Pasadena Public Library, part of the City’s Library and Information Services Department, says the workshop highlights how Haring’s “art and activism continue to uplift LGBTQIA+ rights, visibility and equality.”
The workshop is one of six events in the City’s June Pride Month lineup, announced May 28, which ranges from a City Hall flag-raising to library book groups and a crafting mixer.
There is a local thread running through it. Haring painted what ArtCenter College of Design describes as his only public artwork in Los Angeles right here in Pasadena — a mural at the college’s Hillside Campus, completed in late November 1989. ArtCenter describes the work as a “permanent memorial to members of the art community who have died of AIDS and as a symbol of hope and compassion.” Haring agreed to paint it on one condition, according to the college: that it remain until AIDS had been eradicated.
Haring, born in 1958, first drew attention with chalk figures in New York subway stations before becoming one of the most recognizable artists of the 1980s. He was openly gay and used his work to push for AIDS awareness and safe sex. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he founded the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 to support AIDS organizations and children’s programs. He died in February 1990, at 31, about two months after finishing the Pasadena mural.
His own words anchored the work. “I wanted to make a mural that would last, be something that could be looked at beyond the time when AIDS is an issue,” Haring told students and faculty at ArtCenter in 1989. “This mural should be here for a long time, and AIDS shouldn’t be.”
He cast his art and his life as one. “My life is my art, it’s intertwined,” Haring told the Los Angeles Times that year. “When AIDS became a reality in terms of my life, it started becoming a subject in my paintings. The more it affected my life the more it affected my work.”
Pasadena’s Pride Month programming opened June 1 with a flag-raising at City Hall and continues through the end of the month. The Haring workshop is free and open to teens ages 13 to 19; the library lists it from 3 to 4 p.m. at the Jefferson Branch.
The library says the session will close with participants making their own art.
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