Keith Haring – Art & Theology

Christmas, Day 10: Love

January 3, 2026January 3, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

LOOK: The Life of Christ by Keith Haring

Haring, Keith_The Life of Christ — Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990), *The Life of Christ*, 1990. Bronze altarpiece with white gold leaf patina, 81 × 60 × 2 in. Edition of 9. Chapel of St. Columba, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. All photos by Victoria Emily Jones.

Keith Haring [previously] was a popular artist and activist on the New York scene during the 1980s. Inspired by graffiti art, he started his career by filling empty poster spaces with chalk drawings in the city’s subway stations. He wanted to make art accessible to everyone and believed that it “should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination, and encourages people to go further.”

His style is characterized by bold black outlines, vibrant colors, a sense of rhythm, and simple iconic figures like the Barking Dog and Radiant Baby, which recur again and again in his oeuvre.

Sadly, Haring’s career was cut short by AIDS, which he died of on February 16, 1990, at age thirty-one. The last work he completed, just weeks before his death, was a Life of Christ altarpiece, a work that conveys eternal love and loss, divine suffering and hope. Without any preliminary sketches, he cut the design into clay using a loop knife. It was posthumously cast in bronze and covered in a white gold patina, an edition of nine.

The first edition is housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the world’s fourth-largest church by area, where Haring’s memorial service was held.

Chapel of St. Columba, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, designed by the architectural firm Heins & LaFarge, dedicated 1911. The stained glass windows are by Wilbur Burnham of Boston and Clayton & Bell of London, and the altarpiece, a later addition, is by Keith Haring.

Pulsating, cosmic, and somehow both mournful and joyous, the altarpiece is a triptych, meaning it has three panels. The central panel shows, at the top, a cross, below which is a multiarmed figure holding a baby. The top figure I interpret as God the Father, his arms all-embracing. Below him, at torso level, I discern a second figure (though the head is not clearly defined), who must be Mary, a shining heart over her face. Nestled in her arms is, irrefutably, her infant son Jesus.

Another possible reading is that this is the Trinity—Father, Spirit, and Son—united in an act of self-giving.

The surplus of arms (I count thirteen, plus the baby’s two) reminds me of the Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara in Buddhism; a bodhisattva associated with limitless compassion, his arms represent his extending aid, his reaching out to touch, heal, and uplift. One of the arms here stretches down to bestow a halo on humankind, which in Christianity symbolizes the grace/light of God.

Below this primary grouping is a crowd of people who appear to me to be dancing and celebrating, lifting their arms to receive the blessings that flow forth from the holy child. (Or are they clamoring, turning away, resisting? Without facial features and fingers, it’s hard to tell!) Drops of Jesus’s blood fall over all, bringing redemption.

On the two side panels, angels careen down from the heavens, surfing, leaping, tumbling, one screeching to a halt.

Haring’s Life of Christ combines, as have many artworks before it, Jesus’s birth and death, collapsing his time on earth, his ministry of salvation, into a single image of incarnation and atonement. Mary holds him as a newborn, but she also holds him as a lifeless adult after his crucifixion—a traditional representation known as the Pietà. Many artists have given Mary a sad twinge in her eye at the nativity, suggesting a premonition of loss.

Haring’s figures are faceless, so we can’t look there for emotional clues, but Mary’s body language suggests both a desire to keep and protect her son, and a willingness to give him up for the greater good.

I wonder whether, when Haring incised the sacred blood drops, he was not only thinking of the “power in the blood” that Christians sing about in reference to Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice—and all the weight that bodily fluid as Christian symbol carries—but also lamenting the HIV infecting his own bloodstream, ravaging his body and stigmatizing him, and that had already killed many of his friends and his partner.

Haring’s friend Sam Havadtoy, who was present at the altar’s creation, reports that when Haring finished the piece, he stepped back and, gazing at it, said, “Man, this is really heavy.”

I think the prominence of blood must have been at least partly influenced by the destructiveness of the AIDS epidemic and the artist’s meditation on his mortality, perhaps even hope for transcendence through death. And if so, then the Radiant Baby, who, the artist’s title would lead us to assume, is Jesus, could also double as the soul of an AIDS victim being taken back up to God.

While I hesitate to ascribe prayers or intentions to others that they have not clearly voiced, I can’t help but think that this last artwork of Haring’s, executed in the final throes of his illness, its subject returning him to the Christianity of his youth, to a story that once captivated him, was in one sense a plea for (physical and spiritual?) cleansing, for deliverance.

LISTEN: “We Sing Glory” by Fred Hammond, on Fred Hammond Christmas . . . : Just Remember (2001)

Little baby boy, sent as God among us
For your plan to free all humanity
We sing glory to your name
Sing glory to your name

Tiny fragile heart
Pumped your blood to save us
For you’ve come to be a sin offering
Singing glory to the Lamb
Sing glory to the Lamb

Singing glory to the one
Who saved the whole world
Born to die but you live again
And take all our sins away

Little hands and feet
Made for nail and hammer
For the pain and grief you suffered for me
I sing glory to the Lamb
Oh, glory to the Lamb

Tiny arms and legs
Broad, strong, and sturdy
You carry the key to our victory
We sing glory to your name
We sing glory to your name

We sing glory to the Child
Who will save the whole world
Born to die and then live again
To take all our sins away

Glory, glory to the one
Who was born to save the whole world
You died but you’ll rise again
So Jesus, we praise your name

Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinner reconciled
Thank you, Jesus

Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God has come to save us
Yes, he has

Gloria in excelsis Deo
God has come to save us

Lent, Day 30

April 5, 2022 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Elabena ale gbegbe Mawu lo xexeame bena woatso yeto hena Tenuvi bena amesiame si xoa sena la, mele tsotso ge o, ke bon woakpo agbe mavo.
—Yohanes 3:16

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
—John 3:16 NRSV

LOOK: Untitled (1985) by Keith Haring

Haring, Keith_Untitled — Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990), *Untitled*, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 90 × 236 in. (228.6 × 599.4 cm). Private collection. © Keith Haring Foundation

Keith Haring was an American pop artist who died of AIDS at age thirty-one. I featured him on the blog last year, particularly his connection to the Jesus People movement.

LISTEN: “Alegbegbe” (For God So Loved the World) by Ephraim Amu, 1958 | Text: John 3:16 in Ewe | Performed by the Harmonious Chorale Ghana and the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra, 2019

“Alegbegbe Mawu Lɔ̃ Xexeame” (or “Alegbegbe” for short) is a choral setting of the scriptural passage John 3:16 composed by Dr. Ephraim Amu, one of the leading composers of Ghanaian art music. As do many of his works from the 1950s onward, this composition uses a technique called counterpoint—that is, the sounding of independent melodies simultaneously in different vocal lines, which are nevertheless integrated into a single harmonic texture. The words are in the Ewe language (pronounced ā-wā, with long a’s as in way), spoken in the Volta region of Ghana as well as in southwestern Togo and parts of Benin.

I’ve chosen a recent performance that was captured on video, but for an audio-only performance by the West Volta Presbytery Church Choir, conducted by Amu’s daughter, Misonu Amu, click here.

Dr. Paul Neeley of Global Christian Worship writes, “Dr. Ephraim Kɔku Amu (1899–1995) was a Ghanaian composer, musicologist, and teacher. He was a pioneer in contextualizing life and Christian faith in the African context, starting in the 1920s. He was not afraid to rock the boat of cultural and church norms of the time. He composed hundreds of songs, many of them choral songs in the major languages of Ewe and Twi, and some are still popular today.”

I found a multitude of articles about Amu on JSTOR—most of them quite technical—and I hope to explore his corpus more fully in the future.

Michael Wright on Keith Haring’s “Jesus freak” connection

March 10, 2021January 1, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

Michael Wright is the creator of Still Life, a free weekly letter on art and spirit that I look forward to receiving in my inbox every Monday. On March 8 he wrote about Keith Haring (1958–1990), an artist whose work I first encountered as a child on the cover of the compilation album A Very Special Christmas, which we pulled out from the CD shelf in the family room every December. As an adult I came across Haring’s Life of Christ triptych inside Saint John the Divine in Manhattan (I instantly recognized the style), and one of his anti-apartheid paintings at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Wright discusses Haring’s connection to the Jesus People movement, which I, too, was unaware of! I share this excerpt from the latest edition of Still Life with Wright’s permission. Subscribe here.

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Haring, Keith_Untitled (1981) — Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990), *Untitled*, 1981. Acrylic on vinyl, 96 × 96 in. (244 × 244 cm). © Estate of Keith Haring

Friends,

This week I discovered that the famous street artist Keith Haring was part of the Jesus People before moving to New York City. He grew up in a Christian home in Kutztown, PA, went to church every Sunday and church camp every summer, and read the Bible voraciously. He even carefully read and rated each of the 150 Psalms. In his youth he found his way to the Jesus People movement, most likely through communes local in the area, and his early journals are filled with Christian symbols and apocalyptic ideas: “We must repent now and devote our lives to Jesus Christ! The time is now, time is running out, It can happen at any time! Be prepared for God!” Whew. I had no idea.

The Jesus People movement was a counter-cultural Christian movement of people who were anti-establishment (including church), highly critical of materialism, and committed to living with and supporting the poor. They shared their convictions through the Hollywood Free Paper, a free mailing that featured cartoons lampooning politicians, new age hucksters, and lukewarm Christians. While Haring no longer officially participated as an adult, American Art writer Natalie Phillips says there’s a “direct iconographic connection” between his style and the imagery of the paper. The Jesus People left an indelible mark on his “visual memory,” and once you know it, it’s hard to miss.

In his early subway drawings, Haring often drew the Radiant Child, a small crawling baby surrounded by beams of light. In one of the earliest versions, the baby is the central figure of a nativity scene: the Christ Child. Here’s his own description: “lines radiate from the baby indicating spiritual light glowing from within, as though the baby were a holy figure from a religious painting, only the glow is rendered in the visual vocabulary of a cartoon.” Another common image Haring used was the figure with a chest-sized hole. Sometimes filled with dollar signs, other times broken open by packs of wolves, the imagery evokes unfilled (or wrongly filled) longings and desire. And do you know what was common throughout the Hollywood Free Paper? Chest-sized holes in cartoon after cartoon, an image of spiritual voids filled by Christ himself.

On top of this, some of his late works were explicitly religious. He created a monumental series of the Ten Commandments, he created a mural for a church in Pisa, and, most poignantly, his final work was an altarpiece of the Last Judgment, on view at both New York’s Cathedral of St John the Divine and San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. That’s not to say “Gotcha! He’s a Christian artist!” As a gay man dying of AIDS, Haring was vocally critical of the institutional church and kept his distance during his adult life. Nor should we say this is his “religious art” and everything else is the popular stuff. His compassion for the weak and vulnerable, his critical eye to unjust systems, his celebration of the body and human dignity—this was all part of Haring’s sensibility, and it’s deeply Christ-like too, even if it’s harder to trace in work without obvious religious subject matter.

I guess I’m bringing all this up because I want you to be surprised with me. When I say “Jesus Freak,” the first thing that comes to mind is dc Talk—not a sex-positive, ambiguously spiritual, gay street artist. And yet as a teen, that’s what he called himself. Keith Haring wrote about it in his journals, and he talked openly about the influence of his Christian background. Uncovering this history doesn’t burden the artwork or the artist—it gives me renewed interest in his work. Granted, I write about these topics in Still Life all the time, but I don’t think we have to be afraid of letting religion be one of the many interpretive lenses we use to enjoy the arts. At their best, art and religion can be exactly what Haring hoped for in his own creative work: “It should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It should celebrate humanity instead of manipulating it.”

Take care,
Michael

P.S. Many of the quotes above come from Natalie E. Phillips’ “The Radiant (Christ) Child: Keith Haring and the Jesus Movement,” published in American Art.