This past weekend THE UNIVERSE OF KEITH HARING opens this week for a limited engagement.

THE UNIVERSE OF KEITH HARING by director Christina Clausen is an intimate portrait of world-renowned artist Keith Haring whose mantra was that "Art is for everyone!" The film is a thorough and intimate exploration of the background and career of one of the most popular and significant artists of the 20th century.
 
The film features interviews and archival footage of Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Kim Hastreiter, Grace Jones, Madonna, Yoko Ono, David LaChapelle, Kenny Scharf, Carlo McCormick, Andy Warhol, Ann Magnuson, Tony Shafrazi, and Junior Vasquez, among many others. Audio excerpts from original interviews with Keith Haring, were conducted by Haring's biographer John Gruen (Keith Haring: the Authorized Biography). The film's theme song is by the famed DJ and record producer, Junior Vasquez, with an original soundtrack by Angelo Talocci.

Perhaps Nathan Lee from the New York Times said it best, "Keith Haring was not a great artist. He might not even have been a very good one. But he was the right person in the right place at the right time, and he had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of just the right energy: a radiant, joyful enthusiasm that he shared with unflagging vitality first on the streets of New York and then on the world stage.

Like Andy Warhol, whom he revered and later befriended, Haring was the visual artist as social phenomenon, connecting the gay scene to hip-hop, Madonna to museum culture, the democratic street to the rarefied art world. If his story is only marginal to the history of art, it looms large in the cultural history of our time, which Haring (who died of AIDS in 1990, at 31) saw far too little of."


Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Watch a trailer for the film at TIME OUT!


The Best of Gay New York  and the New Gay Travel Guide