New Moon
menu
New Moon
menu
New Moon
menu
New Moon
menu

HARING’S NEW YORK CITY

BRENDA MARTINEZ

29 SEPTEMBER 2022

A visual essay on the inspiration behind our latest event, which popped off last night in the West Village. To celebrate the cataclysmic collaboration between the storied estate of Keith Haring and the iconoclast jeweler, Pandora Jewelry, we designed on homage to the past with deep roots in the present. Here, we’ll explore the deep research behind our creative strategy, touching on poetry, imagery, and history. 

THE SUBWAY

New York in the 1980s was as rough as it was romantic, gritty and gorgeous, underlined and undercut by a sharp edge of danger and the specter of the AIDS epidemic. Think of this vision of New York not by its streets but what’s underneath: the subway. Think of graffiti-bombed advertisements, orange seats made dynamic with ephemeral tags from teenagers, all a paean to the appeal of spray paint, markers, and a named anonymity.

 

The subway (as a literal underground) and the art scene (as a metaphorical underground) saw the fluorescence of a creative demimonde, made up of working-class artists. Each of them fostering a new age of art, music, ways of thinking, a new New York.

In the midst of it was Keith Haring, a Taurus soul relentlessly seeking sensual earthly pursuits, reframing graffiti by literally placing his bombs in the blank, black frames of advertising posters.

 

A radiant baby here. A barking dog there. A sense of movement and dance, an ephemeral moment captured forever by Tseng Kwong Chi, the enigmatic documentarian of the time.

THE CLUB

At the center of the world, there is New York.

At the center of New York, there is the club.

At the center of the club, there is a community-driven cultural renaissance.

 

 

Pulsing, thriving, lit up in neon and suffused with revelry, places like Paradise Garage, Palladium, Danceteria, and Studio 54 hosted the key figures of the scene in 1980s New York. You’d see DJ Larry Levan on the tapes at Paradise Garage. Photographers like Christopher Makos capturing the movement of dance. Artists like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Fred Braithwaite dancing—Kate Linker called them “Haring’s familiar gang—the radiant children and angels, the lunatic TV-lookers and extraterrestrial forms.”  All of them gathered together to celebrate Haring’s birthday or to celebrate existence or to celebrate Haring’s first curated gallery show at Club 57.

Because the club was also a gallery. 

 

There was sweat, sound, bodies dancing all around in time with the undulating movements of murals by Haring, Basquiat, LAII, set to the beat of a shared song. The club-come-gallery was the epicenter of the cultural shift, bringing together the transformative music scene and the flourishing art scene.

THE GALLERY

 

In 1981, Diego Cortez curated the seismic art show, New York/New Wave, at MoMA P.S. 1, away from the traditional center of art, far from the West Village—Queens. Featuring over 150 artists, all of whom translated the language of the subway or the underground or a party onto a gallery wall, it presented a new way of thinking. A distinctive language for a unique city.

This was art based on life, not on the acceptable modes of ‘art’: a New York-pastiche of Entartete Kunst. The experiences of the marginalized and outcasts of New York, who lived on the fringe until they shifted the meaning of the center. Art made for the sheer, vital need to create, to affix a feeling and a time and a place onto paper or a wall or a canvas.

A living, breathing archive.

At times abstract.

At times clear as day.