The Long Beach Museum of Art used to be the vacation home of Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, a New York railroad heiress. Construction on the building started in 1911, and the museum has been there since 1950. In 2000 the museum added a two-story exhibit pavilion next door.
There’s an on-site restaurant that offers oceanfront dining (and scant vegan options, so I haven’t been). This is the grassy area between the original home and the exhibit pavilion, which is currently home to an exhibition called “Keith Haring: Radiant Vision.”
Born in 1958, Keith Haring was a prominent member of the 1980s art scene. He was known for his distinct style and social activism (civil rights, child welfare, AIDS awareness, and nuclear de-escalation), and he had the revolutionary idea that art should be accessible, not just something that wealthy people could see in museums or purchase for their homes.
He started to gain recognition in the summer of 1980 for doing quick sketches on blank ad space in New York City subway stations. By 1982 he was an established pop-culture artist who had exhibits in New York galleries and worked on both commercial and charitable projects. This poster is for an annual book fair in midtown Manhattan.
These are part of Haring’s “Free South Africa Suite,” created to support the anti-apartheid movement. “Control is evil,” he wrote in 1987. “All stories of white men’s ‘expansion’ and ‘colonization’ and ‘domination’ are filled with horrific details of the abuse of power and the misuse of people.”
Some work from Haring’s “Against All Odds Suite,” created as an artist’s equivalent of free-writing where he sketched based on mood and without a plan. The theme, he wrote, is “Earth we inherited and the dismal task of trying to save it–against all odds.”
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