Audio recorded verbal descriptions provide an accessible and detailed narrative to extend your experience of the AGO. Explore the AGO facade and the artworks outside the building, Henry Moore's Two Forms and Brian Jungen's Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill. These descriptions, rich in detail and sensory language, provide a vivid exploration of form, texture, and artistic intention, ensuring that all visitors can engage deeply with these celebrated pieces of architecture and public art.

Audio recorded verbal descriptions provide an accessible and detailed narrative to extend your experience of the AGO. Explore the AGO facade and the artworks outside the building, Henry Moore's Two Forms and Brian Jungen's Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill. These descriptions, rich in detail and sensory language, provide a vivid exploration of form, texture, and artistic intention, ensuring that all visitors can engage deeply with these celebrated pieces of architecture and public art.

Audio recorded verbal descriptions provide an accessible and detailed narrative to extend your experience of the AGO. Explore the AGO facade and the artworks outside the building, Henry Moore's Two Forms and Brian Jungen's Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill. These descriptions, rich in detail and sensory language, provide a vivid exploration of form, texture, and artistic intention, ensuring that all visitors can engage deeply with these celebrated pieces of architecture and public art.

AGO Exhibition Audio Tracks

AGO Exhibition Audio Tracks

AGO Exhibition Audio Tracks

AGO Exhibition Audio Tracks

Sound clip of rowing in water

Untitled

1988

acrylic on canvas

Private collection

All images © Keith Haring Foundation

This untitled work shows a human figure struggling to walk up a staircase while carrying a massive egg tied to its back. The egg is cracked and a sperm with devil horns bursts from its shell. The painting speaks profoundly to the AIDS epidemic that took the lives of so many within Haring’s community, including his own. Using monumental scale, a palette drained of colour, and graphic imagery, Haring represented the impossible weight of the AIDS crisis.

The Great White Way

1988

acrylic on canvas

The Keith Haring Foundation

All images © Keith Haring Foundation

Stretched in the shape of a penis, this massive painting is a critical visualization of what author bell hooks described as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” The pink phallus is decorated with black lines that make up an intricate scene of weapons, violence, torture, and other abuses of power—a visual representation of the problems of Euro-American society. Haring’s title implies the white supremacist ideology underpinning these activities. The painting shows a phallocentric world in which profit and power in the name of “good” and God are used as tools of oppression. The Great White Way is a prime example of what is perhaps Haring’s greatest skill: the ability to make something look like shallow fun—in this case, a massive, cartoonish, pink, candy-striped penis—while simultaneously speaking truth to some of society’s foremost tyrannies.