Performance Space New York Receives $1 Million Award From The Keith Haring Foundation, Names Main Space The Keith Haring Theatre

As Performance Space New York celebrates its 40th year of fostering and presenting work that centers interdisciplinary work, bold experimentation, community-and-world building, and expression as protest, the organization announces a major partnership with the Keith Haring Foundation.

In 1980, Haring received a studio residency within the P.S. 122 building, where he developed what would become his iconic painting style. Performance Space shares with and draws inspiration from Haring's drive to bring together diverse voices and artistic media, combining seemingly disparate trends in New York culture to create a body of work that captures the spirit of our time. As a centerpiece of this partnership, Performance Space will name its main black box space the Keith Haring Theatre, presenting an exhilarating cohesion of the organization's and the Foundation's visions. In addition to the Theatre, the $1,000,000 award from the Keith Haring Foundation will fund the Keith Haring Curatorial Fellowship, a two-year leadership position for a young curator that culminates in their own independent project, as well as an annual, free-to-the-public Keith Haring Lecture Series.

This landmark year offers Performance Space an opportunity to consider what's ahead through those who, in its vital past, likewise looked ahead at the better futures art and activism could imagine and catalyze. Keith Haring fluidly engaged a variety of disciplines-as seen in his curating of performance ("Acts of Live Art") at Club 57-and in his street art, exhibitions, and collaborations combined a playful sensibility with trenchant social commentary and, in the late 1980s, HIV/AIDS activism. This alliance highlights Performance Space's history of engaging artists building intersecting paths between disciplines and challenging given forms-in conjunction with their transcendence of the norms around them.

Suzanne Geiss-who, with her deep history with Haring's work and estate, energized a strong relationship between the organization and the Keith Haring Foundation, and who Performance Space New York today announced will assume the role of President of the Board of Performance Space New York-says, "A key part of our mission-combining disciplines and communities, and taking inspiration from nightlife-is very much in the spirit of the way Keith Haring viewed the world. Haring's work, his synthesis of different forms of expression into one vocabulary, also really encapsulated the energy of the East Village. In this same neighborhood, now, with the naming of the theatre and the various programs surrounding this partnership, his legacy will constantly be fresh on the mind of artists and audiences of all different generations."

As Geiss steps into her new role, acclaimed theater artist and Performance Space board member Kaneza Schaal has been announced as Vice President of the Board of Performance Space New York.

Keith Haring's History with Performance Space New York

In the summer of 1980, Haring received a studio residency from PS122, and began working on the building's 4th floor. (Visual Art Exhibitions took place inside the artists' studios during 'open studio days' while performers held open rehearsals, works in progress, and presented performance art and dance projects on the second and first floors.) During his 1980 residency, Haring covered the walls of his studio with paintings of pregnant women, animals, birds, human figures with dog heads, crawling babies, and U.F.O.s. Haring's fascination with poems, collage, puzzles, and anagrams became infused with this new pictorial vocabulary and formed a visual lexicon for the work that followed. He also considered and imagined new ways that art could reach the public.

That summer Haring had been papering the East Village with collages of his cut-up New York Post headlines and performing at nearby Club 57. In two performances he made for video from 1980-Phonics and Lick Fat Boys-Haring plays games with language breaking words into phonemes and rearranging them physically with letters on a wall, and verbally by recitation. Inspired by the performers, dancers, poets and filmmakers he met in the many East Village clubs and venues, he expanded his notion of what a painting can be: "The performance (the act of painting) becomes as important as the resulting painting. Movement as painting. Painting as Movement. Moving toward a work of art that encompasses music, performance, movement, concept, craft, and a reality record of the event in form of a painting (i.e., blueprint, choreography). Painting as performance."

Toward the end of his residency, Haring brought these performative practices into his visual art, and began painting on the streets with a marker, a practice that he would expand upon throughout his career. His exhibition at P.S. 122 and use of street art added to his growing visibility, and was a tipping point in his career. Just two years later, Haring's visual language of characters and symbols would become internationally iconic.

In the late 1980s, Haring used his work to vehemently raise awareness and counter a politics of neglect surrounding the AIDS epidemic. After having been diagnosed with AIDS, in 1988 he founded the Keith Haring Foundation, a key mandate for which was to provide funding and imagery to AIDS service organizations and youth programs. Performance Space's own history is deeply rooted in expression as a mode of survival for members of the queer community amidst the era's devastation. Here, unflinching works like Performance Space cofounder Tim Miller and John Bernd's 1981 duet Live Boys-in which Bernd casually listed his physical ailments before the epidemic even had a name-and Ishmael Houston-Jones, Chris Cochrane, and Dennis Cooper's 1986 dance THEM (which was restaged in the organization's East Village Series in 2018) were developed and shared. Fundraisers like 1986's Dancing for Our Lives! A Dance Benefit in Support of Persons with A.I.D.S., and the organizers behind it, took bold, highly visible stands at a time of immense stigma. Stemming from its legacy as a space of radical expression is a continued mission to give space to artists whose lives, identities, and work are often at odds with America's oppressive mainstream. Now, Performance Space New York's partnership with the foundation that protects Haring's legacy, art, and ideals brings already-intertwined histories into a generative, future-oriented dialogue.

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