Keith Haring

The empty advertising panels in the New York subway were covered with black paper. Haring drew on them in chalk — forty a day, for five years. A barking dog, a radiant baby, a figure dancing with its arms out. There are only a handful of signs and the line is thick and plain: a language built to be legible at a glance, and he chose to put it on the street rather than in a museum. He gave the work to AIDS awareness, anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear campaigns, and opened a shop selling it cheap as merchandise. He died of AIDS-related illness in 1990, aged thirty-one.