Art is for Everyone: Keith Haring’s Artistic and Philanthropic Legacy Lives on at the Broad

The foundation’s recent grantees include $2.5 million to fund a full-time nurse practitioner fellowship in LGBTQ+ health at the New York-based, Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. The funder also granted $1 million to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, as well as licensing the group the rights to a cool pink, orange and yellow image for an awareness-raising “AIDS-Free Generation” T-shirt.

The foundation is also a key lender of art and has been an important research partner for the Broad exhibition, called “Art Is for Everybody.” The show itself is a mostly joyous riot of color and zig-zaggy lines, accompanied by a soundtrack taken from Haring’s own mix tapes, including the politically charged music of legendary hip hop group Public Enemy. But it also includes some overtly political, shocking, graphic work critiquing homophobia, apartheid, the growing conservatism of his era, and rapacious capitalism that, back then, seemed like it might be in its final stages.

Sarah Loyer, the Broad curator who organized “Art Is for Everyone,” said that Haring was dedicated to bringing art into the community, a driving force reflected in the title of the Broad show, which was taken from a line in his journals. Between 1982 and 1989, he produced more than 50 public artworks for nonprofits, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages. To further this vision, the Broad show includes all kinds of public outreach events, including a double-decker bus/float that will participate in L.A.’s Pride Parade on June 11, lectures, family events, and a meeting and showing of the exhibit for staff from more than 60 local organizations focused on HIV/AIDs.

Gil Vazquez, Keith Haring Foundation executive director and president, and one of Haring’s closest friends, also came to L.A. for the show’s opening. Dressed in a goldenrod sweater covered with Haring’s dancing figures and topped by a charcoal blazer, Vasquez said that Haring saw art as a catalyst for social transformation. He sees Haring’s choice of him, a person of Puerto Rican descent, to be a founding board member, and the board’s subsequent unanimous choice of him as executive director, as “living proof that the art world is for everyone.”

But Haring’s influence on arts philanthropy stretches even beyond his own work and giving. I was surprised to hear about the role Haring played in the Broad family’s own philanthropy. The museum’s founding director, Joanne Heyler, said that Eli and Edythe Broad went to New York in the 1980s, visited Haring, and started buying his work. Spending time with the 20-something, super-energetic, up-all-night artist — who threw paint at canvases to the pounding beat of hip hop — had a transformational impact on the Broads’ collecting and, therefore, on the direction of their arts philanthropy. Through Haring, they were exposed to the Lower Manhattan arts scene of the 1980s and started collecting not just Haring but also Jenny Holzer, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other contemporaries. As Heyler later put it, “The complex and generative New York art scene of that time was a game-changing phenomenon and the ignition point for the Broads as collectors of contemporary art.”