Art in Transit: Subway Drawings

by Keith Haring (Drawings), Henry Geldzahler (Introduction), Tseng Kwong Chi (Photographer)

Gathers photos of chalk drawings done by the artist on blank advertising spaces in the New York City subway

Genres: Art

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 14, 1984

About the author

Keith Haring (1958–1990) grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to New York in 1978 to enroll in the School of Visual Arts. Over the following decade, he made some of the most widely recognized artwork of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Posted at Shelf Inflicted

I left New York in 1976, so I never had the pleasure of seeing Keith Haring’s subway drawings.

As someone who was brought up never to deface public property, I have mixed feelings about graffiti art. The closest I’ve ever come to practicing the art form was the childish drawings I did on our apartment walls in colored pencils. As I got older, and graffiti proliferated on every public space in New York City, my dad always told me he’d break both my arms if he ever found out I was drawing or hanging out with kids who did.

So you can imagine how daring I felt when my best friend and I drew on buildings and sidewalks using colored chalk. Knowing the drawings would be washed away with the next rain kept me from feeling guilty about defacing public property. Our art was nowhere near as sophisticated as the colorful drawings made by experienced practitioners using spray paint, but I get why people enjoy doing it. It is a way to express oneself and prove our existence by leaving a mark.

I hated the scribbling, the crude stick figures, the hearts with initials inside. To me, that is graffiti vandalism. What I do enjoy is the colorful art that engages the viewer.

Keith Haring’s subway drawings were done in chalk on the empty black paper panels used for advertising. They were artistic, imaginative and confrontational. They had to be done quickly, as he faced fines and arrest if the transit police caught him.

The chalk drawings didn’t last very long, so Keith’s friend, Tseng Kwong Chi, volunteered to photograph the works.

One of my favorite drawings is next to the movie billboard advertising Amin: The Rise and Fall. The radiant babies drawn on the 1982 issue of Penthouse featuring Morgan Fairchild made me laugh.

While this is a wonderful documentation of Keith’s art, it also does a nice job capturing the diversity of the people who ride the subways and shows a glimpse of 80’s culture. I had forgotten how skanky the NYC subway system was in those days.

Sadly, Tseng Kwong Chi died of AIDS complications in 1990, just weeks after Keith did.

I’m glad this book exists.

[Fish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding documentation of Keith Haring's subway drawings. It was super weird to see how terrible all the ads on the NYC subways were in the early eighties, and equally weird/fun to observe the fashion. My favorite drawing by far was the Penthouse cover with the iconic babies drawn on Morgan Fairchild's bust.

[Ken French · Rating 5 out of 5]

I worked in New York during Haring's time and remember his subway drawings vividly. Nice to have this book as a reminder of them.

[Jean Hardy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I work in a college Art LIbrary and stumbled upon this when I was looking for larger volumes of Haring's work. I'm a huge fan of transit and a huge fan of Keith Haring so this book was incredible. My version had cut-outs pasted onto its front and back covers ala early Haring stuff, but on Amazon it shows it without the cut-outs. Did anyone else have this on theirs or was this just someone adding to the book?

[Shane Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun look at Keith's early work and a glimpse of NYC at that time in the early 1980's.