Ricardo Montez traces the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Keith Haring's artistic practice, engaging with Haring's messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries.
In the thirty years since his death, Keith Haring&;a central presence on the New York downtown scene of the 1980s&;has remained one of the most popular figures in contemporary American art. In one of the first book-length treatments of Haring&;s artistry, Ricardo Montez traces the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Haring&;s artistic practice and with which the artist marked canvases, subway walls, and even human flesh. Keith Haring&;s Line unites performance studies, critical race studies, and queer theory in an exploration of cross-racial desire in Haring&;s life and art. Examining Haring&;s engagements with artists such as dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, graffiti artist LA II, and iconic superstar Grace Jones, Montez confronts Haring&;s messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries, highlighting scenes of complicity in order to trouble both the positive connotations of inter-racial artistic collaboration and the limited framework of appropriation.