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The Brant Foundation is about to revive the East Village as a downtown arts mecca. This spring, the institution will debut "Keith Haring," a major new exhibition opening on March 11, 2026, that zeroes in on the artist’s meteoric early years, when a young Haring was chalking subway walls, working out a new graphic language and helping rewrite the rules of what art could look like. The show will be held at the Foundation’s East 6th Street space, just blocks from where Haring’s rise began.
RECOMMENDED: Keith Haring's iconic 'FDR Drive Mural' will be on display for a limited time on Elizabeth Street
Rather than packing the gallery with Haring's better-known (and widely reproduced) work, the exhibition focuses on the artist's output between 1980 and 1983, a period that saw him morph from a downtown presence into an international force.
Curated by Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer, the show pulls together landmark pieces from Haring’s earliest gallery presentations, including selections from his 1982 Tony Shafrazi Gallery show (the famous Blacklight Room) and works from his 1983 FUN Gallery exhibition, which helped solidify the Lower East Side as the nexus of street-to-gallery culture. It’s a survey that tracks Haring’s vocabulary as it formed in real time: grinning faces years before emojis; barking, kinetic dogs; Mickey Mouse mutated through a psychedelic, punk-era lens; and the charged, vibrating lines that became his signature.
“We are honored to be working again with Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer to present an important selection of works by Keith Haring from a pivotal moment in the artist’s career and in our Nation’s history,” said The Brant Foundation’s founder, Peter M. Brant, in an official statement. “Haring was a champion for important causes of his time, particularly the AIDS crisis. He used his art to support his tireless activism and advocate for change, inspiring millions with his distinct style.”
The exhibition places Haring’s activism front and center. His work was never designed to merely adorn a wall; it was engineered to communicate, agitate and reach as many people as possible, an ethos that feels particularly resonant in today’s visual culture.
This marks the Brant Foundation’s latest deep dive into the artists who shaped the downtown scene of the 1980s, following major exhibitions devoted to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Kenny Scharf. The Foundation’s East Village building (a former ConEd substation) has become a kind of shrine to that era, and Haring is a welcome addition to the story.