The BluePrint Drawings (10) is a 1990 print by renowned American Pop artist Keith Haring. The silkscreen comes from a series of seventeen entitled The BluePrint Drawings, which was one of the last of Haring’s short, but incredible career that was cut short by AIDS. Apart from being an artist, Haring was highly committed to social justice and used his work as a medium to inspire change. In his work, he addressed a wide range of issues including apartheid, LGBTQ+ rights, politics, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the crack crisis, and more. In The BluePrint Drawings (10), this driving passion for activism comes alive and communicates the desperation of the AIDS crisis and its devastating impact on the community, both in the physical sense as well as in the form of social taboo. Haring used a playful, universal style and a visual vernacular of own creation to transcend cultural boundaries and connect his audience with a thread of hope for a better future.
The BluePrint Drawings (10) emanates violence and anxiety that heavily contrasts the simplistic, lighthearted style that is indicative of Haring’s recognizable hand. Created in six panels is a narrative that appears to depict the AIDS virus and its unforgiving sting in metaphorical ways. The BluePrint Drawings (10) illustrates the disease as a stabbing sword and a heroin needle, and filters in queer intimacy with the threat of the disease wrapped around lovers in the form of a rope. Haring seemingly dives into the ramifications of the disease being made into a political issue in the form of his symbolic dogs jumping through a hole in a figure, which the artist often used to represent an emptiness in humanity. This figure appears to hold a staff endowed with an ambiguous force, perhaps a characterization of the AIDS virus, or perhaps a tool with the power to stop the blindness of authoritarian dogs that is not being employed.
In two other panels, Haring depicts figures tied at the ankles as if in a slaughterhouse, and a serpent that conjures associations with the snake in the Biblical Garden of Eden. With his unique aesthetic and his integrous values, Keith Haring’s BluePrint Drawings (10) serves as a testament to his enduring legacy and continues to spark a fire for understanding and change in audiences everywhere.
