Comics scholar and researcher John Lent has passed away.John Anthony Lent September 8, 1936 – May 16, 2026 From The International Comics Art Forum: Dr. John A. Lent is one of the leading proponents of the international study of comics, and of comics research within academia. Having lectured and taught on comics and mass communications […]
New York City in the 1980s felt like a very different place. Imagine subway cars cloaked inside-out in graffiti and Times Square without the monumental LED screens. Evidenced by the likes of photographers Steven Siegel, Willy Spiller, and Jamel Shabazz, not to mention Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style(1982), a period of intense, new, rough-around-the-edges energy was canonized. The era marked the birth of hip hop and New Wave, MTV, iconic fashion, legendary nightlife, and Pop Art.
In 1978, just prior to the economy reeling during a major recession, a 20-year-old Keith Haring (1958-1990) moved to Manhattan to study at the School of Visual Arts. “I arrived in New York at a time when the most beautiful paintings being shown in the city were on wheels—on trains—paintings that traveled to you instead of vice versa,” he said in a piece writing published by the The Keith Haring Foundation. The artist was fascinated by people’s responses to art encountered out in the open and unexpectedly—when it found its way into daily life and became a conduit to conversation and curiosity.
Whether with chalk or black paint, Haring could create decisive, confident line drawings of angels, UFOs, dancing figures, snakes, and other motifs virtually anywhere, many of which were temporary. His work is a highlight of the rescued Luna Luna amusement park, and a mural in Amsterdam was obscured by cladding for three decades before being rediscovered. My dad fondly recalls seeing Haring’s paintings in the hallway of the former Manhattan Pearl Paint art supplies store in 1980. I grew up recognizing his signature cartoonish style long before I knew who he was, wearing his work on a favorite T-shirt. And it’s this prescient “art everywhere” focus that grounds an exhibition opening this week at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art called Keith Haring in 3D.
While he didn’t consider himself a graffiti artist, Haring reveled in the technical precision of tags and unique interventions by street artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Lady Pink, Jean-Michel Basquiat as SAMO with collaborator Al Diaz, and many others were painting all over the city. “Graffiti spoke of a world that was hip and streetwise, creative and spontaneous and underground—all that he admired and wanted to be,” says the foundation. And as the trains rolled through subterranean stations lined with advertisements, Haring noticed something else: ready-made blank canvases.
During the recession, advertisers pulled their investment in subway station ad space, and the MTA replaced empty billboards with large sheets of black paper. By this time, Haring was already interested in the idea of art outside of gallery and museum spaces and how “different people saw different things in the drawings,” he says. As he made big works in an open-air space, he was fascinated by the number of people who would stop and the conversations he work would ignite. “This was the first time I realized how many people could enjoy art if they were given the chance,” he said.
Haring’s subway series, Art in Transit, launched him to the apex of the 1980s art scene, where Andy Warhol was already cementing Pop Art’s presence and a circle of graffiti artists, performers, and other creatives were defining the look, sounds, and feel of the decade. Haring made his drawings very quickly to avoid arrest—the police hauled him away on at least one occasion—and his friend, photographer Ivan Dalla Tana, documented many of the works before they were torn down or destroyed. Fortunately, a handful survive, including one in Keith Haring in 3D.
Installation view of ‘Keith Haring in 3D’
The tall chalk drawing on black paper is one of few two-dimensional works in the show, but it’s one of many in the collection of Larry Warsh, who has collaborated with curator Glenn Adamson to bring together a wide range of Haring’s sculptural and multimedia pieces. Today, Haring’s work is among some of the most recognizable by mainstream audiences, yet despite critiques that his work has become “sanitized” in its commercialization—something he was actively, and even controversially, a proponent of during his lifetime—viewers are invited into a unique dialogue with literally a new dimension to his work.
The exhibition is situated within a long, open space, so that viewers can see from one end to the other and meander through different areas free from a prescribed or chronological route. Most of the peripheral wall space is also entirely empty, steering visitors into the center to circumambulate a wide variety of forms and installations. Wandering around steel sculptures, ceramic vessels, archival items, and paintings on numerous found objects, the “all-over” sense of Haring’s oeuvre is manifest. I get the sense that Haring could see the potential in any object or space. If something had a surface, it could be art. How or where you personally encounter it, however, is fundamentally a part of the experience, and this is woven into the exhibition’s design.
From inflatable versions of his iconic “Radiant Baby” motif to an altarpiece made following his diagnosis with AIDS to a series of giant, router-carved “totems,” the works in Keith Haring in 3D celebrate experimentation and collaboration. The exhibition also spotlights, if incidentally, imperative issues in contemporary art today, from cultural appropriation to queer experience, not to mention his candid and direct approach to sharing his experiences with AIDS, from which he died at the age of 31.
Many of the artworks in the exhibition are drawn from Warsh’s personal collection. He had the foresight to collect artworks and fragments of Haring’s studio along with hand-painted garments, the embellished hoods of damaged yellow New York City taxi cabs, a headboard, and even a refrigerator tagged by an array of graffiti artists. With a magpie-like eye for the artist’s recognizably bold-lined paintings, Warsh rescued an illustrated steel I-beam from the building Haring worked in on Broome Street, plus jackets and other garments that the artist painted, among many other objects.
Warsh has long been fascinated by the way the artist applied his visual language to just about anything he could get his hands on. A papier-mâché sculpture called “Untitled (Elephant)” has a unique story to it, too. Adamson shares that the elephant belonged to Warhol, who encouraged Haring to add his own interpretation, but hidden beneath its black-and-white composition is actually an original pink-toenailed version by Basquiat.
A series of works Haring called Totems were inspired by Native American totem poles of the Pacific Northwest region, which he viewed as symbols of community and unity. Large wall-hung mask works are clearly influenced by African masking traditions, coated in Haring’s characteristic lines and bold shapes. Adamson acknowledges that today, we view a white artist’s appropriation of these cultural customs through a different lens, and he expounds on Haring’s interpretation of the “totemic” in a recent article published in Artforum.
Other facets of the exhibition highlight the role of music and pop culture, the New York City club scene, the commodification of art, and Haring’s death from AIDS. A number of posters and merchandise-type objects nod to the artist’s Pop Shop, a retail-meets-art-installation he opened in 1986 in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. It may be seen in the spirit of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store installation in 1961, which also circumvented the conventional gallery show with a DIY, entrepreneurial spirit—something we see so much of today with the aid of social media but at the time was virtually unheard of. Haring’s Pop Shop was controversial, but it was meant to prove a point: “It’s about participation on a big level,” he said. He wanted his art to be as accessible to as many people as possible.
That Haring’s work was virtually everywhere—music videos featuring Madonna and Grace Jones, on advertisements, in fashion, throughout subway stations—is the guiding principle behind Keith Haring in 3D also marking the inaugural show in Crystal Bridges’ expansion. The entire permanent collection has been re-imagined throughout a series of both existing and new spaces, which will open in their entirety this weekend.
Adamson and Warsh originally conceived of Keith Haring in 3D as strictly a book project, but it quickly evolved into something much more. A new book of the same title does coincide with the show, positioning the artist’s three-dimensional works in a new light. Find your copy on Bookshop, and visit the exhibition in Bentonville, Arkansas, starting June 6 and continuing through January 25, 2027. You might also enjoy the Keith Haring Pop Up Book by Poposition Press.
G-AWII RAF Supermarine Spitfire LF Mk-VC AR501 DU-E No 310 Czechoslovak Squadron
This spitfire was built at Yeovil in Somerset and delivered to 310 RAF Squadron based at Exeter in 1942
Photo taken at Old Warden Shuttleworth Wings & Wheels Air Show 30th May 2026
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VH-HET 1945 Supermarine Spitfire HF.VIII RAF as MV239 RAAF A58-758 Marked up as A58-602 RG-V Grey Nurse
Photo Taken at Warbirds over Scone NSW Australia March 2026
Over the course of two decades, Queens resident Joe Macken meticulously built an entire city from the ground up. In fact, he built New York City—the whole thing—one building, house, and bridge at a time. Now, his expansive scale construction is on view in He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model at the Museum of the City of New York.
Macken began working on the 50-by-27-foot model in 2004, first in Middle Village, Queens, before moving to Clifton Park, New York. It comprises 340 individual sections, each built from everyday materials like cardboard and glue, with many of the buildings constructed of balsa wood and detailed with pencil and paint. He completed the structure in 2025, and it’s now on long-term view at the museum, where visitors can walk around it and are encouraged to use binoculars to find familiar buildings and neighborhoods.
Photo by David Lurvey. All images courtesy of the artist and the Museum of the City of New York, shared with permission
You may also enjoy the “Panorama of the City of New York” at the Queens Museum, which was completed in 1964 and took a team of more than 100 people about three years to complete.
Photo by Filip WolakPhoto by David LurveyPhoto by David LurveyPhoto by Filip WolakPhoto by David LurveyPhoto by David LurveyPhoto by David LurveyPhoto by David Lurvey
Operative of the French Resistance with the Cross of Lorraine on her right arm.
Operation Jedburgh was a clandestine operation organised by special operations units from Great Britain, the USA and the French government in exile.
Ironbridge 40's Weekend 2026, held 23rd and 24th May 2026 at Dale End Park, Ironbridge, in Shropshire. An annual 1940's military and civilian re-enactment, using themes and characters mostly from the European theatre of conflict. As always, the atmosphere was fun, friendly and vibrant. Photos taken
Pictures were taken on the Sunday, 24/05/26, at a public event where it is assumed to be OK to publish on the internet. Permission was granted by the subjects for posed photos. However, if anyone wants any photo removed from this set, please contact me, Bob, at dimparcio@protonmail quoting the file number eg DSC1234 and I will do so forthwith. Otherwise, if you like them and would like to download them, please do so, especially if it helps promote re-enactments such as this.
When we think of tarot cards, there’s a standout that probably pops to mind right away: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. It was illustrated by British occultist and artist Pamela Coleman Smith, and more than 100 years after its publication, it remains the most widely used deck by readers. But the cards are far from being the first. Later this month, The Morgan Library & Museum presents Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions, which delves into this centuries-old tradition of divination.
The exhibition celebrates some of the earliest examples alongside modern artists’ versions. Three surviving decks from the 15th century, commissioned by the Dukes of Milan, tap into the lively Italian court culture that produced the cards, plus how the imagery evolved and laid the groundwork for fortune-telling practices.
A complementary display emphasizes how artists throughout the 20th century reimagined the imagery, including Smith’s iconic deck from 1909, plus iterations by Surrealists André Breton, Victor Brauner, and Remedios Varo. The connection isn’t coincidental; Leonora Carrington devised a gilded deck in the 1950s, and Salvador Dalí also contributed his own version.
Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions highlights how artists have turned to the practice to explore what the museum describes as “an alternative to the strictures of modernist aesthetics, allowing them to explore other universes and imaginative possibilities.” The show is accompanied by a catalog, which you can order from The Morgan’s shop. See the exhibition from June 26 through October 4 in New York.
Roy Lichtenstein’s long-lost Anxious Girl (1964) is up for auction this weekend and is rumored to go for $60 million. Roy was a leading artist in the Pop Art movement. Some of his best known pieces were large stylized pieces that looked like cut-outs from a newspaper or comic book. Anxious Girl was derived by DC […]
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