International Youth Year
International Youth Year
Signed Print
Keith Haring
Lithograph, 1985
Signed Print Edition of 1000
H 28cm x W 22cm
Critical Review
This signed lithograph from 1985 is a limited edition of 1000 by Keith Haring. International Youth Year was created to celebrate International Youth Year as proclaimed by the United Nations in the same year. The print was originally published by the World Federation of United Nations Associations in New York and shows a bright blue stick figure dancing underneath a pink sun, set against a glowing yellow backdrop and red landscape.
International Youth Year was an initiative by the UN that held activities all over the world, focusing attention on issues concerning and relating to young people everywhere. It is particularly apt that Haring was chosen to design this poster due to his vivacious and playful style that appealed to young people, exclusively using bold outlines, simplified shapes and bright, flattened colours.
Haring was tireless in his work with children of all ages and backgrounds, collaborating on murals with young people in America’s poorest inner cities and holding numerous drawing workshops. Upholding a world view that rendered racial, cultural and sexual differences immaterial, Haring admired children for their sense of innocence claiming, ‘Children are colour-blind and still free of all the complications, greed and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them.’ Haring’s ageless and genderless figures, as seen in International Youth Year are indicative of this worldview that the artist promoted.
