New exhibit showcases old connection between pop artist Keith Haring and Iowa City elementary school

• Keith Haring, a renowned pop artist from the 1980s, had a close connection with students at Horn Elementary School in Iowa City.
• Haring's mural at the school, which has quietly lived there since 1989, was relocated for renovations.
• The mural will now be part of a new exhibit at the Stanley Museum of Art, where visitors can learn all about the New York artist's connection with Iowa City students and teachers — and how his art impacted them for a lifetime.
• The mural was one of the last ones Haring completed before he died in 1990.

IOWA CITY — When Horn Elementary art teacher Colleen Ernst first wrote to New York pop art icon Keith Haring in the early 1980s, she didn’t really expect to hear back.

Her fifth- and sixth-grade students had asked her why she always talked about dead artists from the past, rather than ones making art today. She realized they had a point.

So with an address found in a New York City phone book at the public library, she took a chance by writing Haring, then a rising star in the art and celebrity world, to ask for some photos and commentary of his current work.

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Little did she know how passionate the artist, known for his colorful subway motifs with barking dogs and dancing silhouettes, was about education. After a few letter exchanges with the teacher and her students, Haring visited Iowa City — first briefly in 1984, and again in 1989.

“Haring believed in education as a cornerstone of our civic responsibility and his work not only expressed that, but it also catalyzed it,” said Diana Tuite, visiting senior curator of modern and contemporary art for the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. “He’d say that children were his most important audience.”

For many years, Haring’s mural painted at the school’s library during his 1989 visit went largely unnoticed by the general public. But this May, the piece called “A Book Full of Fun” will recenter his connection to Iowa in a Stanley Museum exhibit.

The exhibit, opening May 4, contextualizes his connection to Iowa and the bridges his values created between unlikely audiences before he died from complications of AIDS in 1990.

“Keith returned to Iowa City in 1989 because he wanted to make his mark here,” said Ernst, who taught at Horn Elementary from 1979 to 2010. “It’s easy for people to forget what it was and what it stood for.”

His impact on students

Through the eyes of upper elementary students in 1989, Haring didn’t inspire the intimidation that his fame and reputation in New York easily could for many adults. To them, he was part of the class.

Ernst said the children took to him immediately as he blended their work and suggestions with his own one-day mural.

“He was a famous young man but also just a happy young boy,” Ernst said of the artist, then 31. “He had art to do and the whole world to do it in.”

Even for students who weren’t artistically inclined, his presence has reverberated lifelong impacts. For 10-year-old Lisa Margolin, watching Haring paint his mural freestyle without a graph was a master class in improv.

“I was kind of a perfectionist. Art class really made me nervous because there was no right answer in it,” she said. “He saw it and put it where he was going to put it. That was amazing to watch.”

Today, she treasures the only autograph he gave out that day — a signature embedded in a quick drawing resembling the figures in his motifs. After majoring in theater and trying to pursue it in New York, the Iowa City resident said the lessons she learned that day are still part of her comedy routines posted to YouTube.

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“Improv is a lot like that blank canvas. We don’t know what it’s going to be,” she said. “(The autograph) was such a cool thing then, and it gets cooler as I get older. It’s art — it changes as I see it from different aspects.”

The mural, depicting clowns, animals and other objects of whimsy reflected not only his childlike sense of wonder but the children it was made for. Ernst remembers his call for suggestions in real time.

“Paint a toaster!” one student suggested. So with a laugh, he took the pointer to paper, finding room for a smiling piece of toast to jump out between a duck’s head and a fish sticking out its cartoonishly long tongue.

“I had no idea what he was going to create, and as far as I could tell, neither did Keith,” Ernst said.

The power of his art

Haring would often carve time out of trips to visit schools and introduce children to the power of art as he knew it.

Working up until the month he died in February 1990, Haring felt he had much to accomplish and little time to do it. While promoting tolerance of different races and sexual orientations, the gay artist put a lot of thought into challenging the role of art among everyday folks.

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In a world where art was often reserved for high society, the man raised in rural Pennsylvania believed all viewers had a responsibility to participate in art.

“He was really concerned about the way that art had been co-opted and it sort of occupied a very elite space, culturally,” said exhibit curator Diana Tuite. “He’s thinking hard about who he wants to reach and how you create a vocabulary that is both legible and ambiguous in ways that invite people to bring their own interpretations.”

Children, he believed, kept him honest.

“He said at times that they knew what the rest of us have forgotten, that their tolerance … is something so precious,” Tuite said. “To hear stories of some students who met him is to hear them describe someone who came, met them on their level, and respected them as thinkers — as creative spirits worthy of his respect.”

Ernst said she simply wanted her students to experience the excitement and pleasure that an artist can have in their work. Keith’s last visit to Iowa City was about nine months before he died.

While driving Keith from the airport, the teacher noticed a bruise on his forehead — a symptom of the diagnosis he went public about three months after his visit. After his visit, the school coordinated education for students with the University of Iowa’s newly established HIV clinic.

“Because he had AIDS and because it was the ‘80s, I knew that, ironically, Keith would be another dead artist soon,” Ernst told The Gazette. “When he died … it was as though someone in my family had died.”

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The exhibit

The new exhibit rekindling the late artist’s connection to Iowa and middle America will give visitors a view of his life’s work through the lens of his episode in Horn Elementary, as well as the values his work embodied. Opening on what would have been Haring’s 66th birthday, it will feature works, photographs, letters with students and archival materials contextualizing his visits in his meteoric career.

Tuite said the mural, moved to the Stanley Museum’s archives recently during Horn Elementary renovations, was a big deal for its time. While Haring often carved out time on trips to visit elementary schools, the mural he painted for Iowa City was something of a civic project.

“That’s what we want to honor in the way the project feels now. We know the exhibition feels like it belongs to many people,” she said. “This show demonstrates not only what can happen when communities band together, but what it looks like to be a place that is tolerant, accepting and encouraging of expression and inquiry.”

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Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.