Presented in conversation with SNMA Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian, Ricardo will discuss his Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire (2020, Duke University Press).
The event is free, open to the public and conducted via ZOOM.
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About Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire
In the thirty years since his death, Keith Haring—a central presence on the New York downtown scene of the 1980s—has remained one of the most popular figures in contemporary American art. In one of the first book-length treatments of Haring’s artistry, Ricardo Montez traces the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Haring’s artistic practice and with which the artist marked canvases, subway walls, and even human flesh. Keith Haring’s Line unites performance studies, critical race studies, and queer theory in an exploration of cross-racial desire in Haring’s life and art. Examining Haring’s engagements with artists such as dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, graffiti artist LA II, and iconic superstar Grace Jones, Montez confronts Haring’s messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries, highlighting scenes of complicity in order to trouble both the positive connotations of inter-racial artistic collaboration and the limited framework of appropriation.
About Ricardo Montez
Ricardo Montez is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies. His research examines the performance of race, ethnicity and sexuality in visual culture and media.
He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University where he was also a Faculty Fellow in Latino Studies. Additionally, he held the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. His book, Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire, was published by Duke University Press in September 2020.
Book Cover: Keith Haring body painting Bill T. Jones, London, England, 1983. Photo by Tseng Kwong Chi © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. www.tsengkwongchi.com Art by Keith Haring © The Keith Haring Foundation