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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
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James Baldwin believed that love could be terrifying, but also our only hope. For Keith Haring, hope lay in art.
This week, I talk with Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin told through four relationships that shaped Baldwin’s life and art. Boggs describes love as central not only to Baldwin’s novels but to his political writing, and traces his journey from a difficult Harlem childhood and the Black church to his role as a writer, messenger and witness.
All of Baldwin’s work was about love. All of his novels were love stories… And his nonfiction writings, political writings, were also about love.” — Nicholas Boggs
Then, I revisit part of my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Haring challenged the boundary between high and popular art, from his subway drawings to the Pop Shop. Gooch talks about Haring’s collaborations, his determination to communicate across class and cultural lines, and the legacy of his belief in “art for everybody.”
“Keith did everything that he could do to blow that system [the art market] apart.” — Brad Gooch
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Tags: Black history, James Baldwin, queer artists, Keith Haring, Brad Gooch, Nicholas Bogss, queer writers, Writer’s Voice
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