In the early 1980s, a young artist dodged transit police in the New York subway to draw glowing, crawling babies in white chalk on blank black advertising panels, knowing each one would be erased within days. This episode follows Keith Haring from a Kutztown, Pennsylvania childhood drawing cartoons with his engineer father, through a teenage phase in the evangelical Jesus movement that taught him the power of simple iconography, to commercial art school in Pittsburgh, which he abandoned rather than learn to sell products.

We look at how studying semiotics at the School of Visual Arts shaped his universal visual language, how a photographer friend documented the subway drawings so the work survived, and how he went from the downtown scene to Soho galleries and international shows alongside Warhol and Basquiat. The conversation covers the con ...