Continuing with our fortnightly artist study I recently hosted a session to look at the work of Keith Haring.
Why Keith Haring?
I am not sure why I chose Keith Haring – prior to running this session, I didn’t know a great deal about him or his work and I had, mistakenly, thought he was British. I knew he was a younger artist and a quick look at the style of his art showed that he was quite different from the others that we had studied and would pose some interesting questions for the children. That was where my knowledge ended and I learnt a lot whilst planning and delivering this session.
Materials Needed
For this session I provided each child with a range of printouts should they wish to make their own pack of information.
- Famous Artist Research Brochure (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Colouring Pages (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Paper Dolls (From TpT)
I also suggested pens and paper for a short activity
How I ran the Session
My studies have a similar flow and approach. With this one I told the children about Keith Haring, but put a particular focus on those that were influences to him and his work. Keith Haring was interesting to study as he was so very much influenced by the people who saw and read about and it prompted him to work in different ways.
We also looked at his graffiti art and we posed the question about what point does it become OK to graffiti in a public place? This prompted an interesting conversation from the children,
I found a video that I showed the first few minutes of which showed Keith Haring at work; it demonstrated some of the speed which he worked at as well as some of the range of his work.
I explored Haring’s move to New York and his work alongside Angel Ortiz and touched upon the changes taking place in technology and society during the 1980s and how this was leading to more experimental works.
I mentioned how the ‘radiant baby’ became a signature of Haring’s work and we discussed the commercialisation of his work through his Pop shops.
I then moved on to showing the children some of Haring’s work; including the painting on the Berlin Wall and other political pieces. We touched upon some of the issues (the children in the group are aged from 4-10 so we didn’t cover all the details, just the use of art as a political statement) and the simplicity of his work.
I had thought that his work would be popular with the children, and it was with some but was less popular with others. My own eldest wasn’t especially taken with the art of Keith Haring.
Whilst looking at his work we noted that the absence of gender and race identifiers might make his work more engaging and accessible to all people.
Art Activity
For the art activity, I asked the children to create either themselves in the style of Keith Haring or to make a poster for a cause in his style. Haring’s work isn’t overly complex in style so this was a quick activity for the children to do.
Follow up with my own children
With my own children, we have followed this up by adding to our artist project book and adding Haring to the world map we are building. We talked again about Haring’s work and how we felt about it in comparison to the other artists we have studied so far.
We also completed a YouTube tutorial to recreate one of his images which the children enjoyed having a go at doing.
Other artist studies can be found below.
More interesting work – never heard of him myself, suspect the children have a broader grasp of artists than me!