Keith Café #1: Keith Haring x the artist
During the Keith Haring: Grace House Mural exhibition, SCHUNCK will be organising four ‘Keith Cafés’, in collaboration with a number of cultural partners based in the city.
Where
Royal Theater Heerlen
Price
€ 0,-
This series of four ‘café evenings’, open free-of-charge to the public, will be exploring more deeply the many sides of this iconic artist’s life and works by way of presentations, interviews, films, music and a poetry slam. The Keith Café always takes place at a cultural meeting point somewhere in the city. This, the first Keith Café, will take place in the foyer of the Royal Theater in Heerlen on Thursday 2 June. Keith Haring x the artist will be the central theme of the evening.
Programme
Presentation: Barry Blinderman – Art in Transit
Barry’s presentation provides a detailed, first-hand account of Haring’s work. It starts in 1981, when he first met Keith at Club 57 in downtown Manhattan and he published his first article in an art magazine. In 1984, Barry exhibited Keith’s chalk mural, together with Tseng Kwong Chi's illuminated photographs of his subway drawings, at the Semaphore EAST gallery. In 1990, the year of Keith’s death, Barry organised "Keith Haring: Future Primeval," Keith's first touring exhibition in the United States, which opened at the Queens Museum in New York.
Barry Blinderman is curator, writer, teacher and artist. From 1980 to 1987, he managed the Semaphore Gallery and Semaphore EAST in New York City, where he represented the work of Keith Haring, Tseng Kwong Chi, and other highly distinctive artists of the era. From 1987 to 2018, as director of University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, he curated the United States’ first monographic exhibitions for David Wojnarowicz, Jane Dickson, Walter Robinson, Michelle Grabner, Keith Haring, and many others. Blinderman lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently writing his memoirs entitled ‘The Curator's Tale’.
Barbara Strating interviews Jan Rothuizen
Barbara Strating will be interviewing artist Jan Rothuizen about his friendship with Keith Haring. The Amsterdam-based artist got to know him when he was 18, before Haring became a household name. They regularly worked together in the 1980s. Rothuizen will be sharing a number of anecdotes from the period, as well as a drawing he made of Keith’s studio.
Barbara Strating works as a producer, moderator and writer, who explores the boundaries between science, art and society. She studied philosophy and cultural sciences at the University of Nijmegen.
Visual artist Jan Rothuizen (1968) is best known for ‘De Zachte Atlas van Amsterdam’, a collection of town plans, in which he not only sketches and describes the features of the urban environment, but also writes down what he thinks, feels and surmises. The stories he tells about the places in his work can be read like maps, without a fixed beginning or end. His drawings appear in de Volkskrant every month, as well as in book form. In 2020 a ‘map’ of Heerlen drawn by Rothuizen appeared in de Volkskrant. In 2011, he produced a drawing of Hoensbroek (a town in the north of the municipality). Both these drawings can be seen in the store window at SCHUNCK. Rothuizen’s work has featured in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in Cairo, the New Museum, and the MoMA in New York.
Het Belangrijke Genootschap: Sanne Berger
Borderlines, the literary platform of Stichting PANDA Collectief, together with Het Belangrijk Genootschap Met Een Nog Onduidelijke En Steeds Wisselende Maar Immer Literaire Inhoud (HBGMENOESWMILI), will be dishing up Sanne Berger. As part of the Keith Café, she will be explaining how the exhibition has inspired her.
Sanne is currently studying for a degree in Visual Communication, which will qualify her as an illustrator. In addition to illustrations, Sanne also enjoys writing poetry, something which she believes goes hand in hand with illustrations. “My poetry paints a picture and my illustrations tell a story. They reinforce each other and provide a cohesion through which I hope to give the reader a glimpse of my world, which is formed by nostalgia, vulnerability, humour, emotion and a dash of chaos”.
- Café open: 7.30 pm
- Start: 8.00 pm
- End: 10.00 pm
Film: ‘The Universe of Keith Haring’
Keith Café #1 will be followed by a screening of the film ‘The Universe of Keith Haring’ in the main auditorium of the Royal Theater. ‘The Universe of Keith Haring’ is a 2008 documentary by Christina Clausen about the artist Keith Haring. Through the use of colourful original footage, the film resurrects Haring’s legacy, which is retold by friends and admirers, such as artists Kenny Scharf and Yoko Ono, and gallery owners Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Shafrazi.
Length: 90 minutes