When Keith Haring Painted Chicago

• Andrew Hickey

In the spring of 1989, at the invitation of a local teacher named Irving Zucker, artist Keith Haring came to Chicago to paint a 500-foot-long mural in Grant Park with the help of more than 400 CPS high school students. The project was a PR sensation. WTTW made a short documentary narrated by Dennis Hopper. Rolling Stone came to town to cover the project. Haring, who’d been diagnosed with AIDS in ’87, would die of complications from the disease just nine months later.

As for the Grant Park mural, a portion of it is on display at Midway, where Zucker worries it’s being exposed to the elements. He says CPS informed him that the rest of Haring’s mural is in storage at a warehouse space in the West Loop.