Keith Haring's Line

"KEITH HARING'S LINE offers one of the first monographic treatments of Keith Haring's artistry, paying specific attention to Haring's engagements with non-white artists and artistic traditions. Foregrounding Haring's fetishization of men of color, Ricardo Montez seeks to challenge fixed narratives of race and power by moving from a notion of collaboration to a model of complicity. In doing so, Montez asks how we can view Haring's signature artistic line-with its appropriation of Black and Latino artistic cultures-as mobile and unfixed, rather than encased in a foreclosed moral narrative. Montez takes us into the scenes of artistic collaboration, examining how Haring's interactions with artists of color were problematic in their racialized components, but also provided new avenues for representational practice. Lastly, Montez, a performance studies scholar, seeks to examine the work that Haring's line and artwork continue to do in the world, thereby unsettling moralizing narratives t hat have developed since the artist's death in 1990. This book is comprised of an introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1 examines the early writing and work of Haring, theorizing the ties between the