Keith Haring preview dinner at BMA

Last night I attended the preview dinner at the Brooklyn Museum for the Keith Haring: 1978-1982 exhibition. I took a few snapshots off my iPod. Upon entering the museum the first thing I was struck by was that Toxic and my brother Kel First had paintings displayed by the elevator, this was a nice surprise considering so much of the focus on contemporary urban art is focused on street art perse.

Once at the exhibition space you are hit with a massive painting and next to it a mini pop shop, *note take the kids you will leave broke, lots of cool stuff to get. Entering the gallery one is struck with awe at his prolific creativity, you can see from his early beginnings signs of great curiosity in things and his ability to seek out and develop the language and fluid techniques to illustrate his thoughts. I was most struck by a collection of 12 or so notebook pages that had abstract geometric shapes one per page, I had never known of this in his work, the correlating reference to it was in his notebooks, his journals are impressive and show his interest in symbiotic analysis. It is from these two things I walked away with a greater appreciation of his journey.

The subway drawings are epic, they recalled a time when NY was fun and when taking the train one could be overwhelmed by the graffiti inside and out of the trains and usually Keiths satirical drawings waiting for you at the station.