Keith Haring in 1987: Antwerp, Knokke, M HKA.

In the opening year of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Keith Haring created a mural in the museum. During that same period, he was also in Antwerp and Knokke, through exhibitions, encounters, and a network of gallery owners, artists, collectors, friends, and chance witnesses.

Much of that story lives on today not only in archives, but also in personal memories or a small visual memory that was never shared publicly. With this project, M HKA and PLUS-ONE Projects aim to bring those traces together as the starting point for a broader investigation into Keith Haring in Antwerp and Knokke, and into the significance of that period within his practice and in reflection up to the present day.

For this research project, M HKA and PLUS-ONE Projects are collaborating to map all of this. M HKA provides the institutional and historical context of the museum, while PLUS-ONE Projects contributes to research, network activation, storytelling, and the tracing of private and public traces that can deepen this narrative.

The collaboration stems from a simple conviction: some art histories live not only in collections and catalogues, but also in people. That is precisely why personal memories, oral testimonies, and visual material are not peripheral information, but an essential part of the research. After all, that is an essential part of Keith Haring's artistic practice.

The period around 1987 is historically significant for the M HKA, for Antwerp, and for the bond between Keith Haring and Belgium. At the same time, it is also a moment for which many direct witnesses can still be reached, though not endlessly.

This is therefore not a casual nostalgic appeal, but an initial screening for a carefully constructed process. We are seeking material that can help verify facts, better understand stories, and make the social, artistic, and urban context of those years visible once again.

It started in 1987, in the old KNS theatre in Antwerp, during a recording of the Belgian television programme Het Eiland. Keith Haring was a guest, and on the backdrop behind him, the Radiant Baby glowed. I was sitting in the audience next to Juan, wearing my Jazz Montreux t-shirt, one of only two young people in a theatre full of serious faces. From the moment he appeared, I was captured. There was a warmth, an energy, a way of being that was unlike anything I had encountered before.

At the end of the recording, I introduced myself, a nervous young admirer, unsure of what to expect. There was no need to be nervous. What I found was warmth and calm, completely disarming. A few weeks later, I found myself at the Casino in Knokke, part of the world around his exhibition there. I wasn't really helping,  I was simply present, going with the flow. That was enough. That was the invitation he extended to people.

After the opening of Gallery 121 in Antwerp, I was included at the dinner table, alongside collectors, gallerists, major figures. I was seventeen. I didn't fully understand who I was sitting next to. That was perhaps the point. Keith made no distinction. He pulled people in, young, unknown, unimportant by conventional standards, and made them feel entirely welcome. That generosity was not a gesture. It was simply who he was.

This is not my story. I was one of many drawn into Keith's orbit during those years in Antwerp, Knokke, New York, Paris, and Düsseldorf. But I was a witness to something that has stayed with me for almost forty years: the rare, genuine openness of an artist who believed that art belonged to everyone, and who lived that belief every single day.

That is why this project matters. Not to tell my story, but to capture, before it fades, the collective memory of what it felt like to be in his presence, and what that presence meant for a city, a museum, and a generation.

Jason Poirier dit Caulier, PLUS-ONE Projects & A.P./ Studio

It didn’t begin in a museum gallery or an art book, but in a friendship that appeared almost by chance and ended up shifting my life for good. We were in the eighties, a time when, as a young guy from Ghent, I was discovering my own universe: graffiti on walls, breakdancers on squares, hip-hop records that travelled from New York all the way to us. That culture felt like a new language, raw and direct, and Keith Haring fit into it seamlessly, an artist who seemed made of the same energy and at the same time a person unlike anyone I had met before. What first felt like a single encounter became a whole world opening up, a world in which drawing and living could no longer be separated.

Keith had friends like Madonna and Andy Warhol, but in his diary he wrote that his two biggest fans lived in Belgium. That line has never left me, not because I’m proud of it, but because it shows how closely he paid attention, how precisely he saw people. I was one of those two. I wasn’t a famous collector, nor an influential curator. I was just David, a young guy hungry for images, music and stories. And yet I was fully inside his orbit, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

In Paris, New York, Ghent and Antwerp I learned that his line was not just a visual form, but an attitude. He drew on walls, on jackets, on paper, but just as much on the lives of the people around him. He took me to places where art and nightlife flowed into one another, where a drawing could appear on a napkin or a T-shirt, and where there was no boundary between the studio and the street. What I saw there was a radical kind of naturalness: art was not meant to be locked away, it had to circulate, stick, move.

We shared moments that now almost feel mythical: a wedding where Madonna and Warhol were simply guests, a city where a new mural appeared like a message addressed to everyone. But the real weight didn’t lie in the names. It lay in the small gestures: the way he listened, the time he took, the invitation to come closer, even when you didn’t yet know what you were there for. Keith made the impossible feel normal: he treated me, and so many others, as if we were naturally part of his story.

This is not my story alone. It is one of many paths that were bent by his presence in those years, in Belgium and far beyond. I witnessed how his work in Knokke, in Antwerp, in New York transformed not only spaces, but also the people moving through them. For a generation of artists, designers, musicians and collectors in Belgium, he was a catalyst, proof that from here you could be part of a global cross-pollination.

Almost forty years later, I still carry that experience with me. Not as nostalgia, but as a task. The openness I felt in him, his belief that art was for everyone and that friendship could be a form of practice, has remained the compass for how I work and live myself. That is why this project matters: not to repeat a myth, but to capture, before it fades, what it was like to be seen by him, and what that gaze has meant for my city, my generation and the way we still look at art today.