Keith Haring: Radiant Vision @ CMA - Columbia Museum of Art

Keith Haring: Radiant Vision

Columbia Museum of Art

September 27, 2025 - February 15, 2026

Keith Haring at work in studio 

Photograph © 1982 Allan Tannenbaum / sohoblues.com

The Columbia Museum of Art (CMA) presents major exhibition Keith Haring: Radiant Vision. Most recently on view at the Pop Art Museum, Seattle, this internationally touring exhibition celebrates the life and work of iconic artist Keith Haring.

“Keith Haring’s art was a pop-culture spark ¬— fast, fearless, and drawn from the concrete heartbeat of New York,” says CMA Executive Director Della Watkins. “With Radiant Vision, the Columbia Museum of Art offers audiences a powerful and playful tribute to Haring’s enduring belief that art belongs to everyone.”

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, KEITH HARING (1958–1990) emerged as a shooting star of the legendary New York art scene in the 1980s. His signature images include dancing figures, a “radiant baby,” a barking dog, a flying saucer, hearts, and figures with televisions for heads. He became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat and grew interested in the color graffiti art of the city’s streets. Haring met Andy Warhol at a gallery exhibition in 1983, and Warhol became Haring’s mentor, friend, and the theme of several of his pieces, including “Andy Mouse.”

In the early ’80s, Keith Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate his work with a wider audience — he created chalk drawings on the unused advertising panels in New York City subway stations. These drawings represented a unique conflation of studio practice and public art, cartoons, and graffiti. They became familiar to commuters, who would often stop to engage with the artist. He also attracted the attention of city authorities, who arrested him for vandalism on numerous occasions.

Keith Haring was openly gay and socially conscious, and his murals often reflected his position on social issues. He sought to raise awareness of AIDS, fought against the proliferation of drugs, and advocated for the end of Apartheid. Haring’s oeuvre, from street art to gallery shows, the Pop Shop, and commercial work, is deeply rooted in and reflective of the concept of “art for the people.”

His simply drawn figures were soon to be found on watches and cars, T-shirts and shopping bags, turning Keith Haring into one of the best-known artists of his generation. Radiant Vision is a collection that features over 250 original works including drawings on paper, lithographs, silkscreens, posters, and other items that illustrate the entire span of Haring’s heartbreakingly short but incredibly prolific career.

The exhibition also includes the work of LAII (Angel Ortiz, b. 1967), an artist known for his collaborations with Keith Haring. LAII’s career took off in 1980 when Haring, fresh from the Pennsylvania suburbs, encountered his “Little Angel” tag on a New York street and sought him out.

The regional debut of Keith Haring: Radiant Vision will be celebrated with an early evening preview party on Friday, September 26, as well as a playful daytime program on Saturday, September 27.

Single Source Traveling Exhibition provided by PAN Art Connections.

COLUMBIA MUSEUM OF ART - CMA

1515 Main Street, Columbia, SC 29201

www.columbiamuseum.org

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote @ Library of Congress, Washington DC

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote
Library of Congress, Washington DC
June 4 - September 2020

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote

© Library of Congress, Washington DC

Handwritten letters, speeches, photographs and scrapbooks, created by American suffragists who persisted for more than 70 years to win voting rights for women, are featured in a new exhibition at the Library of Congress. “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” tells the story of the largest reform movement in American history with documents and artifacts from the women who changed political history 100 years ago.

Drawing from the personal collections of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriet Stanton Blatch and others, along with the records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman’s Party – all donated to the national library years ago – the exhibition explores women’s long struggle for equality. “Shall Not Be Denied” will trace the movement from before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, through the divergent political strategies and internal divisions the suffragists overcame, the parades and pickets they orchestrated for voting rights, and the legacy of the 19th Amendment that was finally ratified in 1920.

“As institutions in Washington and across the country mark the centennial of women’s suffrage, now is a great time to learn more about women’s history. At the Library of Congress, we are so thrilled to share this new exhibition at this moment of national reflection,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Through the personal collections of many extraordinary women who helped shape this country, you will get a more intimate view into the struggles, the rivalries and ultimately the triumphs of this 70-year movement.”  

The exhibition is part of a yearlong initiative in 2019 inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers. It will explore the stories of dozens of diverse women who shaped the suffrage movement and made history.

Highlights of the exhibition include marquee records, images, music, merchandise, cartoons and ephemera of the movement. Key items include:  

- Abigail Adams’s letter from 1799 refusing to consign women to an inferior status;

- A rare printed version of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a listing of demands Elizabeth Cady Stanton read to more than 300 at Seneca Falls, and the proceedings of a larger national women’s rights meeting two years later in Worcester, Massachusetts, that drew more than 1,000 suffrage supporters;

- A sculpture of Susan B. Anthony (portrait bust) that she hoped would one day be displayed in the Library of Congress, now on loan for the first time from the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument;

- An original broadside of the Declaration of Rights for Women that suffragists distributed in Philadelphia in 1876, disrupting the nation’s centennial celebration when Anthony presented the declaration on stage to acting Vice President Thomas Ferry;

- A draft manuscript of Stanton’s controversial and best-selling “The Woman’s Bible” that paired Biblical text with feminist commentary;

- Suffrage sheet music and merchandise used to “sell” the idea of suffrage;

- Images and film footage of political activity on the streets, including the first national parade for suffrage in 1913 in Washington, D.C., which exposed racial divides in the movement and was disrupted by an unruly mob;

- Banners, pins and a cap and cape worn by suffragists during parades and demonstrations;

- Photographs of early picketing at the White House and documentation of suffragists’ subsequent arrests, imprisonment and force feeding;

- Carrie Chapman Catt’s Ratification Notebook with notes on her strategy to win ratification of the 19th Amendment in each state; and

- An interactive display on suffragists who helped win the vote state by state.

“Shall Not Be Denied” is part of the national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, marking major milestones in 2019 and 2020. The exhibition opens on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Senate’s passage of the suffrage amendment that would become the 19th Amendment once it was ratified by three-quarters of the states on Aug. 26, 1920.

An online crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe documents within the Library’s unique suffrage-related collections to make them more searchable and accessible will be ongoing during the exhibition. For more information go to the By the People website: crowd.loc.gov.

“Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” is made possible by the Library of Congress James Madison Council, with additional support from 1st Financial Bank USA, Democracy Fund, Thomas V. Girardi, AARP, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation, HISTORY® and Roger and Julie Baskes.

The Library is inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers through a series of exhibitions, events and programs. Exhibitions drawing from the Library’s collections will also explore Rosa Parks’ groundbreaking role in civil rights history and artists’ responses to major issues of the day. Other events throughout 2019 will explore changemakers through music, performances and public programs. 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
101 Independence Ave., SE - Washington, D.C. 20540
www.loc.gov

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite @ Skirball, Los Angeles - MoAD, San Francisco - Columbia Museum of Art

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite
Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles
Through September 1, 2019
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
December 4, 2019 – March 1, 2020
Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina
June 26 – September 6, 2020

The Skirball Cultural Center presents Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, the first exhibition to focus on this key—and until now under-recognized—figure of the second Harlem Renaissance. Through more than forty iconic images, Black Is Beautiful illuminates how in the late 1950s and 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite (b. 1938) used his art to popularize “Black Is Beautiful,” now considered one of the most influential cultural movements of that era. Organized by Aperture Foundation, the exhibition makes its national debut at the Skirball.

Inspired by the writings of famed activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Kwame Brathwaite harnessed the power of art, music, and fashion to effect social change. Along with his brother Elombe Brath (1936–2014), he founded two organizations that were instrumental in realizing his vision: the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers, in 1956; and Grandassa Models, a modeling group for black women, in 1962. Kwame Brathwaite organized fashion shows showcasing clothes designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

During an era when segregation prevailed across the United States, Kwame Brathwaite’s body of work is remarkable for challenging mainstream beauty standards that excluded people of color. His photographs of African American women and men with natural hair and clothes that reclaimed and honored their African roots instilled a sense of pride throughout the community. In addition to Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs, the exhibition displays several garments worn during the fashion shows, as well as a selection of ephemeral materials.

Kwame Brathwaite’s son, Kwame S. Brathwaite—who co-curated the exhibition with Aperture Foundation’s Michael Famighetti and Skirball managing curator Bethany Montagano—remarked, “My father preserved the legacy of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ movement, which is not merely a slogan, but a template for the way that art and activism can propel us toward equity and inclusion.”

“Black Is Beautiful demonstrates how Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs disrupted cultural norms and helped to broaden our definition of what is beautiful and who gets to decide,” added Montagano. “In keeping with the Skirball’s mission to affirm the dignity of every cultural identity, we are honored to highlight an artist whose body of work and guiding principles call upon us to work toward a more just and inclusive society.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1938 and raised in the Bronx, New York, Kwame Brathwaite spent most of his adult life in and around New York City. In the late 1950s,Kwame Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath became active in the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement led by Carlos Cooks. At the same time, the brothers regularly produced and promoted concerts and art shows at venues such as Club 845 in the Bronx and Small’s Paradise in Harlem, while Brathwaite photographed the events.

Throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite contributed photography to leading black publications such as the Amsterdam News, City Sun, and Daily Challenge. By the 1970s, Kwame Brathwaite was a leading concert photographer, helping to shape the images of major celebrities, including Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, James Brown, and Muhammad Ali. Kwame Brathwaite wrote about and photographed such landmark events as the Motown Revue at the Apollo in 1963, WattStax 1972, the Jackson 5’s first trip to Africa in 1974, and the Festival in Zaire in 1974.

Today Kwame Brathwaite resides in New York City and is represented by Philip Martin Gallery in Culver City, California. He is married to Sikolo Brathwaite, a former Grandassa model whom he met through their work together. She continues to advocate for the empowerment of black women today. Their son, Kwame S. Brathwaite, is currently the director of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive in Pasadena, California.

Following the Skirball presentation of Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, the exhibition will go on national tour, traveling to Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (December 4, 2019 – March 1, 2020) and the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina (June 26 – September 6, 2020), among other venues to be announced.

The exhibition at the Skirball coincides with the publication of the first-ever monograph dedicated to Kwame Brathwaite. Featuring in-depth essays by Tanisha C. Ford and Deborah Willis and more than eighty images, Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, May 2019) offer a long overdue exploration of Kwame Brathwaite’s life and work.

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful, Aperture, 2019

Photographs and introduction by Kwame Brathwaite

Essays by Tanisha C. Ford and Deborah Willis

8 ½ x 10 ½ in. / 21.6 x 27 cm

144 pages, 91 black-and-white and four-color images

Hardcover with jacket / 978-1-59711-443-1 / May 2019

SKIRBALL CULTURAL CENTER
2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049
www.skirball.org