One of Melbourne’s most iconic examples of queer public art, the world-famous Keith Haring mural painted on an exterior wall of a school building in Collingwood, turned 40 years old last year.

Since the site was taken over by Collingwood Yards, a multi-purpose arts precinct, this institute has become the custodian of one of our most well-loved examples of art, optimism and resilience.

Keith Haring died of AIDS in 1990, aged just 31 years old.

On 12 June 2025, we are hosting a Collingwood Yards x Archer Studio event celebrating Pride Month and Keith Haring’s work, featuring a panel of artists, a performance by The Huxleys, with a DJ and drinks to follow. This event will be followed by two additional panels exploring queer art, activism and optimism.

Amy Middleton spoke to two experts in the field of public art about everything Keith Haring stands for, and the legacy imbued within this iconic mural.

Chris Parkinson is a lecturer on history and theory of street art and graffiti at the University of Melbourne; Caroline Kyi is a private wall paintings conservator and University of Melbourne lecturer on the conservation of street art.

Amy Middleton: Let’s talk about the nature of this mural. What makes it so special, and why are you interested in it?

Caroline Kyi: I’ve been working on the mural’s conservation for a while now with Collingwood Yards and Heritage Victoria. My connection comes from being physically engaged with the mural. It’s about the object, but it’s also about the community surrounding it.

When you’re working onsite at Collingwood Yards and you see the people who pass by, there’s so much genuine love for the mural.

AM: What are some of themes of Keith Haring’s work that make this mural – and his legacy – so important? 

CK: Joyous expression.

HIV/AIDS was very stigmatising and divisive – people who were positive or at risk were seen as outsiders. It created holes and divisions in society. But Keith’s artwork is a celebration of joy.

His death and his art give us a retrospective on those events. We can look at them with the passage of time and see all the tension around AIDS that shouldn’t have occurred, and reflect that there were many amazing things that came from queer artists during that time.

This mural is a celebration. As a queer artist who died so young, all those things on paper could work against him, but they don’t. And they shouldn’t, and never needed to.

Chris Parkinson: During that period in New York (the 1980s-90s), he presented this kind of monumental freedom and a capacity to hold space. I think that was one of his hugely important legacies: his capacity to hold this very strong, staunch, fierce yet friendly, buoyant and optimistic kind of queerness in the world.

As a very publicly queer person – at least from my vicarious experience and through readings of that period – his impact was monumental.

And it wasn’t just the murals that he used as tools for advocacy and activism. It was in that daily representation and holding down of queer space that was profound and significant.

You wouldn’t want to make comparisons necessarily, but through the queer white male contemporary history of art, I see both Keith Haring and David Hockney as these hugely vibrant figures that have kept the conversations of queerness and mortality going. Because both of them were witness to massive, massive loss as a result of HIV/AIDS in the ’80s, both of them, through my readings of their histories, were in this constant state of grieving and loss. 

Despite that constant state of grieving and loss, they both somehow have this incredible capacity to transfigure that grief and loss into light and movement.

CK: Yes. It’s a victory! People are complex, and sometimes the complexity of who you are may be amplified in certain ways at certain periods of time. We can’t ignore what happened during that time, because it’s absolutely heartbreaking; so many people’s lives were destroyed. The mural brings a point where it’s not all about that. There is also victory, and joyous celebration. 

In Melbourne, it’s a celebration of everything that he is and was. Now many years down the track, we can enjoy it and respect where it came from, and all the values that it is imbued with. 

I think the mural also represents a safe distance to do this reflection from: the mural is an object that allows you to take the discussion away from individuals, and project it on an object, which can often feel like a safer space to explore these ideas.

AM: Can you speak a bit more about Keith Haring’s other artforms? 

CP: I think this idea of ‘tough and tender’ is hugely important when it comes to Keith Haring.

He kind of owned this space within the graffiti and hip hop culture that was very tough, and kind of extreme and on the edges, and he worked in this space with a tenderness. [This tenderness] has a legacy that is both aesthetic and creative, but also steeped in a philosophy as well – it won’t always impact the very kind of masculine and testosterone-charged graffiti culture, but it has certainly inflected it through time and opened doorways to far more considered approaches in some practitioners. Not in everyone, but certainly in some.

AM: Tell us about the importance of conserving this mural.

CK: I’m a wall paintings conservator.  I work at the University of Melbourne on a subject about the conservation of street art for conservators – so it’s about asking how we actually deal with the materiality of that.

I work with murals and street art, and art in public space, and you often tap into the community that surrounds it as well. Whether or not people identify that it’s by this artist, they just see it as part of Collingwood.

Particularly during lockdown, when galleries were closed, it felt like a little piece of New York in Melbourne. That’s the openness of it. It’s like having an animal in a zoo versus seeing it live in its natural environment, and that’s what makes it particularly exciting.

CP: I’m going to come at this from a slightly different angle. There are two really important points in my childhood that drew me towards this more subcultural stuff that Keith Haring was involved in, namely graffiti practices and urban practices. 

One of them was the film Break Dance from the ’80s; my brother and I used to perform to it.

Another is a retrospective I saw by photographer Annie Leibovitz when I was an early teen, with a photograph of Keith. The background is entirely painted and he is naked, also entirely painted. That Leibovitz show blew my mind. But that particular image, I think really held allure for me. 

What has appealed most to me – as something of a neurodivergent thinker – is his sense of movement. That has been something which has been hugely therapeutic for me as a human being in the world.

I have this identification with how Haring moved as a painter, from those videos of him painting himself into a corner – 

CK: Literally.

CP: Yes – that he would create at art school; and then to the way his brushstrokes and his hand style on the wall. Of course, the movement that is represented within his painting, that is very much steeped within hip hop culture, and his experiences in the clubs in the ’80s.

All of that kind of comes together for me in this really nice, neat way.

Collingwood Yards are the proud caretakers and conservators of The Keith Haring Mural. We ask our community to assist us in this important work by making a donation, big or small, to the Keith Haring Mural Fund.

Donate to the Keith Haring Mural fund here.

Panel 1: 6pm, Thursday, 12 June
Keith Haring, Art and Social Optimism for Change
With Emil Cañita, Darcy Enoki McConnell, Chris Parkinson, and Lauren O’Dwyer, moderated by Amy Middleton followed by a performance from The Huxleys
Tickets here

Panel 2: 6pm, Thursday, 19 June
Trailblazed: Transgender Conversations Across Generations
With Rex Letoa Paget and Latoya Hoeg
Tickets here

Panel 3: Thursday, 26 June
To be confirmed, stay tuned for exciting updates.