The BluePrint Drawings (14) is a print from 1990 created by Pop artist and activist Keith Haring. This screenprint comes from The BluePrint Drawings portfolio, a series of 17 screenprints and one of Haring’s last portfolios created prior to his AIDS-related death, which cut his revolutionary career short. One of the remarkable aspects of The Blueprint Drawings is its exploration of various social and political themes that were central to Haring’s artistic vision. The series touches upon subjects like environmental concerns, technological progress, urban life, and the AIDS crisis, which had a profound impact on Haring personally and manifested with particular poignancy and urgency in his work after his diagnosis with the virus in 1987.
The BluePrint Drawings (14) reflects Haring’s distinctive style, characterized by defined lines, simplistic imagery, and a playful energy. Although heavy in content, through his use of comic book and graffiti-inspired imagery, Haring makes this work accessible to a more diverse audience and enables them to engage with its themes without confronting them with realistically explicit material. In The BluePrint Drawings (14) Haring depicts metaphorical realizations of the experience of living with the AIDS disease in a society who considered it taboo and overlooked the importance of treating it due to systemic prejudice. Haring employs the imagery he created during his career to communicate with his audience by using spots to symbolize the presence of AIDS, thought to be a reference to the symptomatic lesions of the illness.
In the upper left panel of the composition, Haring displays a gender-neutral figure hanging by their hands and being impaled by a nude form with an object. The object is imbued with a power indicated by Haring’s signature gestural lines and appears in the right hand and lower panels of the composition in the hand of the spotted figure, allowing the audience to define the essence of the weapon.
On the right side panel, the spotted form bears a hole where it was struck on the first panel, a memory of the wounds of its past. A separate figure peers through the hole, a motif Haring commonly used as a symbol of emptiness, creating a feeling of invisibility. This impression is reinforced in the third, lower panel as a line of dogs leap through the figure. The dog is one of Haring’s most recognizable images, known most commonly to refer to corrupt authority, and in The BluePrint Drawings (14) may have been Haring’s way of addressing the overlook of the epidemic by government and health institutions. The BluePrint Drawings capture a distinct time in Keith Haring’s life and career, at the culmination of his career and zest for activism and at the end of his life, making the series a powerful testament to his impact and a masterful rendering of his experience with the AIDS crisis.
