The artist Keith Haring painted Silence = Death in 1988, the year he was diagnosed with AIDS. He died two years later, age 30. The pink triangle itself made reference to the cloth badge sewn on the uniforms of gay prisoners during the Holocaust. The figures in his triangular painting refer to the Reagan administration’s well-remembered refusal to address the AIDS crisis. The mortal consequences of that failure are legion.
The painting appears at the very end of the American Masters documentary on Keith, produced by PBS. As an object, its superficial beauty draws us in. Silver caligraphy shimmers in the light against a heady pink. The overall image appears graphically balanced. Looking closer, we see his classic figures are holding their hands over their eyes, ears and mouths, illustrating the intentional acts of social rejection and isolation experienced by many in the gay community during that era.
The power of that image is still with me. Keith has created a work whose beauty disguises a brutal message: “This is who we were as a nation during a pandemic that attacked our youth.” We see similar rejections of reality as we confront the variants of Covid-19.
Using the ordered vocabulary of the Shadowed Squares, “Love Letter” reaches back in time and pays direct homage to Keith Haring and one of the last century’s most significant paintings. Mine is a painting about that painting, a brotherly love letter and a thank you. In it, my essentially asemic caligraphy echoes his cartoon vibrations, simple lines expressing empathy, emphasis and joy.
