See inside Keith Haring's first LA Museum Show, featuring a pop shop and a pink leather suit once worn by Madonna

Keith Haring’s line drawings adorned underground tunnels and the highest art exhibition halls. This month, however, marks his first museum retrospective in Los Angeles. “Keith Haring: Art is for everyoneanimates 10 galleries at the Broad, the culmination of a decade of effort initiated by the museum’s namesake founder, Eli Broad, the late businessman who got his start as a collector by buying Haring’s work and of his downtown friends in the 1980s.

Despite the commercial successes of Haring’s approach to accessible art, such as his 1986 Pop Shop, “Art is for Everyone” pays homage to Haring’s political activism. The exhibition showcases over 120 works of art and relics that offer shocks of topical vigor, both on and off the canvas, from paintings to experimental videos, ephemera and more. As well as drawing on its own holdings, the Broad has secured 67 loans from the Keith Haring Foundation and 42 from private collectors.

“The exhibition offers the opportunity to see works from across the entire arc of the artist’s career,” curator and head of exhibitions Sarah Loyer told Artnet News. This includes work produced by Haring while a student at the School of Visual Arts, until his death at age 31 from an AIDS-related illness.

“Art Is For Everyone” opens with a striped room showcasing Haring’s Day-Glo paintings. Music from his mixtapes transports viewers to the Tony Shafrazi Gallery circa 1982. After exploring Haring’s affinity for the many moving parts of the graffiti scene, such as hip-hop and breakdancing, the show illustrates how his work has become more fervent over time.

“He covered topics ranging from nuclear disarmament in the Cold War era to religion at a time when the Christian right promoted abstinence-only education despite the growing AIDS epidemic, as well as police brutality. , racism, patriarchy and capitalism,” Loyer said.

The show concludes with Haring’s AIDS activism, then features a series of works by inner-city art stars like George Condo and Jean Michel Basquiat, who collaborated with the force that was Keith Haring .

While arranging the show, Loyer came to appreciate that Haring worked with the “confident line” as his primary medium. “If you look closely, you can see it change over time, from early spray-painted works to intricate compositions filling huge unstretched tarps,” she said. Although “Art Is For Everyone” offers universal delights, like a crown Haring helped create for Grace Jones and the pink leather suit Madonna wore to her birthday party in 1984, the show demonstrates primarily Haring’s ability to blend criticism and optimism across many resounding lines.

After its presentation at the Broad, “Keith Haring: Art is for Everyone” will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. Take a look below.