Keith Haring Bathroom Mural @ The CenterWednesday, March 7 through Saturday, March 31, 2012
Public Viewing of the Keith Haring Mural(Photos taken Thursday evening, March 15, 2012
8 PM
To mark the 20th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the Center invited 50 artists to create new work in the Center. Curated by Barbara Sahlman and the late Rick Barnett, The Center Show featured well established and emerging artists, each of whom chose the site and subject for the pieces they created. These artists included, among others: Leon Golub; Barbara Sandler; Kenny Scharf; Nancy Spero; Robert Storr; Richard Taddei; George Whitman; Martin Wong. Much of their work remains on display throughout the Center.
Keith Haring painted a mural entitled “Once Upon a Time” in the second floor men’s room. Since The Center Show opened on June 1, 1989, the “Haring Bathroom” has become an internationally known tourist destination. Completed months before he died of AIDS, this mural is perhaps Haring’s most personal and resonant expression of sexual jouissance, and is the only Haring mural of its kind.
As part of the Center’s major renovation of 1998-2001, new, code-compliant bathrooms were created, and the old bathrooms were re-purposed as meeting rooms. But the Haring Bathroom needed a different approach. The partitions and toilets were removed but the tile walls and all the old pipes and ducts were left where they were when Keith originally painted on or around them.
Between 1989 and 2011, through normal use, not to mention the major renovation project, the mural acquired a layer of grime and some of the underlying paint started to peel away from the plaster. The plaster and paint on which Keith painted were not in the best shape to begin with and you can see areas where he painted over pre-existing cracks. It was time to bring in a professional conservator to clean and stabilize the mural. Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer offered to underwrite that work and put the Center in touch with Rustin Levenson Art Conservation Associates. In October 2011, Harriet Irgang Alden and her colleagues spent three weeks cleaning the entire mural, one square inch at a time, applying stabilizing material where wall paint was separating from plaster and carefully in-filling some of the lines.
We are proud that the Center can be the protector and preserver of this part of Keith Haring’s legacy and we are committed to continue to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and to support those who have it through our programs and services.
To support the Center’s art and services, stop by the front desk or visit gaycenter.org/support.
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