KEITH HARING | UNTITLED (BLUEPRINT SERIES)

Collection of Tom Otterness and Coleen Fitzgibbon, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1982)

Tom Otterness, like many other artists, first remembered meeting Haring at the Times Square Show in the late spring of 1980. He recalls, “I was an elder statesman at 28 when Keith and Kenny [Scharf] showed up beaming with enthusiasm...still at SVA but already real artists. Keith was anonymously putting posters all over the streets. A xeroxed New York Post cover ‘Reagan slain by Hero Cop!’ He used these posters as wallpaper around the show. I was making cheap plasters and selling them on the streets and in the Souvenir Shop at [the Times Square Show]. Many of the artists in the show put inexpensive work in the Shop. Keith had a rack of Business Week magazines that were quietly altered with gay porn pasted in them. After that summer, Keith’s work seemed to blossom, then explode in the subways, streets, and galleries. Ideas and work began to flow effortlessly from his incredibly fast and sure hand.”

Both Otterness and Haring also participated in A New Sensibility, a group show of paintings and sculptures at Young Hoffman Gallery, Chicago that aimed at exhibiting young talent in 1982. The show included works by John Ahearn, Richard Bosman, Mike Glier, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Richard Miller, Peter Nadin, Tom Otterness and Judy Rifka.

“I was then (and still am) deeply inspired by Keith having directed his art to everyday people on the street. I think they were always his primary audience, and the collectors were secondary funders of his street presence,” Tom Otterness told Sotheby’s in reflection of their friendship on the occasion of Dear Keith.

The plaster work by Otterness, Lot 1054 in Dear Keith, was acquired by Keith Haring through artist trade, a typical and frequent form of exchange between many of the East Village artists. Otterness recalls, “Later Keith kindly contributed a pretty racy blueprint drawing for a mail order catalog I was working on for Colab. He signed the drawing to me and I gave him the commemorative plaque plaster in trade.” The present work is the item Keith exchanged with Tom, which Otterness and his wife, Coleen Fitzgibbon, have consigned in the spirit of Keith’s generosity in order to raise additional funds for the LGBTQ Center in New York.

“He always supported the most radical actions and art at the time. Keith once owned a plaster of Duchamps’ Female Fig Leaf, a casting from the exposed vagina of his secret last work Étant donnés. Duchamp gave a plaster cast of the fig leaf to Man Ray, who in turn made 10 hand painted plasters from it. This is all to say that Keith shared the black humor of fellow artists in provoking the straight white art world. This humor is evident in much of his non-public pornographic work. His friendship with Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, and his allegiance to fellow graffiti writers is part of his provocation of what was at the time an all-white art world,” says Otterness. 

The plaster work by Otterness from Keith Haring’s collection is being offered as Lot 1054 in Dear Keith: Works from the Personal Collection of Keith Haring.