“They form a perfect time capsule of my beginning in New York City.” 

—Keith Haring, on The Blueprint Drawings

Keith Haring originally drew the images of The Blueprint Drawings over a period of weeks between December 1980 and January 1981, shortly before he began to breakthrough as a mainstream artist in New York, displaying his artwork on a Times Square billboard through the Public Art Fund in January 1981. As Haring explained of the time, “the original drawings were executed on vellum with Sumi ink because I intended to make blueprint copies of each of the drawings. Periodically I would take my drawings to the local blueprinters, where I had much enjoyment trying to explain the content of these works to the men who operated the blueprint machines. After a few weeks, everyone in the shop was familiar with my drawings. This was also the time I began drawing in the NYC subways.”

The drawings were first exhibited in a small gallery space in February 1981, marking Haring’s first one-man exhibition in New York. Though Haring did not sell any of the original drawings during the exhibition – only a few of the blueprints sold – before the exhibition, Haring made photostats of each drawing, which became basis for the screenprints. His last cohesive project, published just a month before his death in February 1990, the screenprinted Blueprint Drawings sees Haring revisit some of his earliest exhibited work and his most recognizable motifs, which were largely deemed to be too violent or sexual to sell at the time of his first solo exhibition. 

Plate 1 of the series prominently features many of his most revisited symbols: radiating, genderless figures, a barking dog and invading flying saucers play out in a scene of chaos. Here, these forms pulse with life and exuberant movement through tightly dotted patterns, simply expressive lines, and a dynamic, comic book-style layout – elements that would later become emblematic of Haring’s distinctive visual lexicon. Through revisiting the early drawings as screenprints, The Blueprint Drawings offer a glimpse into Haring’s early development of his now-iconic stylistic hallmarks and themes, as he began to make a name for himself as an artist in the New York scene by communicating ideas relating to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, homosexuality and otherness through these bold, graphic symbols.