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"Keith Haring: Art and Commerce" opens Saturday (March 18) at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N. Ashley Drive, Tampa, and continues through June 11. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8 adults, $6 seniors and $3 students. Free for children 6 and younger. (813) 274-8130 or www.tampamuseum.com.
TAMPA - Jade Dellinger is a bright young star in the art world, a respected journeyman curator (official term: independent curator) who has organized exhibitions around the country.
The Tampa Bay area has benefited by being his home base, with a number of fine shows he has delivered at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art and the Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida.
His latest local effort is "Keith Haring: Art and Commerce," which opens Saturday at the Tampa Museum of Art. It is as much a personal as professional effort.
"I never met Keith in person," Dellinger said in a recent interview, "but I corresponded with him and we talked a lot on the phone. He was incredibly generous to me even though I was only a high school senior and then in college."
Haring was, of course, a graffiti artist who made the leap, as did Jean-Michel Basquiat, from mean streets to museums in the 1980s. Haring was almost as famous as Andy Warhol, with whom he felt an affinity for the older artist's ability to challenge and merge the boundaries between high and low culture, fine and commercial art.
But Haring had his own ideas about fame and the power and mystique it confers. He was always canny about marketing himself and his work, was never averse to making a buck. But unlike many other artists of his time - Warhol and Basquiat are two who again come to mind - Haring seemed to feel that financial success created an imperative, rather than an entitlement.
"There were few people who could so easily turn down money," Dellinger said. "There had to be a larger good for doing something commercial."
During the last years of his life, before he died of AIDS at 31 in 1990, Haring used his art to benefit children's organizations, hospitals, day care centers, hospices and orphanages. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, which would funnel his profits into charitable causes.
But Haring, at first the darling of art critics for his fresh, simplified figures that developed into mythic symbols, was excoriated for opening the Pop Shop in lower Manhattan in 1986.
Haring stocked the retail store with affordable posters, prints and mass-produced products he designed. He was considered a sellout, cashing in on his popularity, trivializing his art.
Detractors seemed most indignant that they had to pay for the buttons that Haring had given away by the thousands. Plus, he no longer made his chalk drawings on the black paper covering advertising space in the subway. That art entertained people at no charge for years and was frequently pilfered.
"I think Keith saw the Pop Shop as an extension of the subway work," Dellinger said. "He believed in the democratization of art. Now it's so common, but back then he was ridiculed."
The public, however, flocked to the store, able to buy bits of hipness for as little as a couple of quarters.
The Pop Shop closed in 2005 because, Haring Foundation directors said, the rent was going up so much that the shop wasn't earning income for the foundation, which was always its mission.
Dellinger suggested bringing it back in spirit when Ken Rollins, Tampa Museum's interim director, approached him about ideas for a new show.
"Keith Haring made a lot of sense," Dellinger said, "given the recent closing of the Pop Shop. It seemed a good opportunity to talk about his influence on art today."
"Art and Commerce" is a very focused exhibition and much smaller than the Haring retrospective at the museum in 1991.
Dellinger will partially re-create the Pop Shop in the small Bank of America Gallery, painting the walls, but not the carpeted floor, using the templates from the original mural Haring created in which he covered every surface, to sometimes claustrophobic effect, with his iconography.
Walls and cases will display prints and items that were for sale in the shop, along with original drawings the artist made for products ranging from Swatch watches to fashion collaborations with designers Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Sprouse.
Many of the objects have never been publicly shown. Dellinger hunted down examples of T-shirts Haring made in his early 20s, when he was just out of art school, to finance road trips to follow Grateful Dead concerts. The Haring Foundation, which reluctantly loans its collection, also contributed illustrations he did in high school, a few paintings and a number of projects he worked on: album covers, posters for one of his causes, the hand-painted paper lantern he made for the Pop Shop in Tokyo.
Drawing the Line, the acclaimed 1990 documentary with Haring, friends (including Dennis Hopper), curators and gallery owners, will be looped continuously.
"My hope," Dellinger said, "is people will get a sense of the Pop Shop as soon as they walk through the doors."
"Art and Commerce" is a good companion piece to the museum's larger exhibition, "Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak." Like Haring, the museum is going for a populist approach. At this point in its history, that is a safe, smart and conciliatory approach.
Times photo - JOSEPH GARNETT JR.
Independent curator Jade Dellinger holds one of Haring's works at the Tampa museum. He corresponded with the artist before he died of AIDS in 1990 at age 31, though they never met. "He was incredibly generous to me even though I was only a high school senior and then in college," Dellinger says.
c.2006 St. Petersburg Times
