Courtesy of Katia Perlstein, Brussels, Belgium ©Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring, Unfinished Painting. The painting is dated 1989; the artist died of AIDS the next year.
The picture is in the exhibition “Hide/Seek,” which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum. It features works by Marsden Hartley, Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Rauschenberg, Johns, Agnes Martin, Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz, Deborah Kass, and many more artists who dealt with (or encoded) the subject of sexual identity in portraits.
The show, the first one in a major museum on this theme, explores how the “dynamics of eroticism”–the ways that artists signal who’s gay, who’s straight, who’s in the closet—changed over the history of American art. Hear how the curators interpret the works in these videos on Art Babble. Chime in on the museum’s Facebook page. And check out the show for yourself (admission is suggested, pay what you want).
