Watch Great Art Explained Season 4 Episode 5 Online

Haring had championed the poster format as a traditional form of political activism. He saw in them the immediacy which we now think of when we think of his aesthetic. It was in 1982 that he created one of his first posters. He printed and paid for 30,000 of them, which he gave out for free during an anti-nuclear protest in New York. He would use his platform to get us talking about socio-political issues often ignored, by employing a tradition used by political agitators since printing began.