Brett Krasnov: “Though not wearable anymore, this will always be my favorite vintage dead shirt. I helped [Keith Haring] screen some of these for sale at the big Englishtown show [September 3rd, 1977]. This was in the mid 70’s while I was a college student [in Kutztown]. He used to hang out at a house I lived in just off campus called the White House. Artists and musicians tended to live and hang out there.”
Three years before his chalk drawings began appearing throughout New York City’s subway stations, a young Keith Haring was already experimenting with ways to bring his art directly to the public. During the Dead’s Spring 1977 tour, Haring sold hand-screened t-shirts (like the one shown here) outside several shows.
Keith discovered the Dead in 1975, and during his brief tenure at Pittsburgh’s Ivy School of Professional Art the following year, he took a silkscreening class and began producing T-shirts featuring Dead imagery. With his housemate Barbara, Keith sold his first shirts outside the Spectrum on April 22, 1977. According to Barbara, Keith later snuck past security and handed one directly to Jerry.
Shortly after dropping out of the Ivy School, Keith and his then-girlfriend Suzy hitchhiked across the country, using the sale of his t-shirts to help finance the trip. In journal entries from May 1977, Keith recounts selling shirts at the Dead’s show at the St. Paul Civic Center on May 11. As shown in image #3, the cover of Keith’s journal from this period bears two Grateful Dead stickers.
While Keith’s participation in the Spring ‘77 tour is well documented, Brett’s account may be the first to suggest that his involvement extended into the fall.
As for image #2, Brett recalls buying the drawing from Keith in Kutztown around 1975-76 for just $5. According to biographer Brad Gooch, most of Keith’s high school works were lost after he accidentally left his portfolio in a stranger’s car in the summer of 1976. That this rare drawing survives is remarkable, and offers further evidence of the Dead’s influence on his early work.
I’ll be speaking more about Keith’s connection to the Dead at the Popular Culture Association conference in Atlanta this April.
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