美国国家公共电台 NPR In An NYC Stairwell, One Of Keith Haring's Murals May Be In Peril

In An NYC Stairwell, One Of Keith Haring's Murals May Be In Peril 

play pause stop mute unmute max volume 00:0004:01repeat repeat off Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser 1 to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: 

There was a time in the 1980s when it felt like Keith Haring's work was everywhere, especially in New York. Throughout the country, you would see his graffiti-inspired figures on posters and T-shirts. One of his lesser-known murals in New York is threatened now. NPR's Joel Rose takes us there.

JOEL ROSE, BYLINE 2: The mural is in a pretty unlikely place - the stairwell of a former convent called Grace House, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But there they are, a procession of Keith Haring's familiar cartoonish figures - the radiant baby, the barking dog - dancing up and down three flights of stairs.

ROBERT SAVINA: Most of them are very simple, very joyous 3, very happy. It's sort of a great meditation 4 when you're walking down the steps or up the steps. And depending on the time of day with the light changing, you know, the mural changes. You see different things each time you pass it.

ROSE: Today, the building houses tiny, low-cost apartments. Robert Savina has lived here for two years. He discovered Grace House and the mural when he was scouting 5 locations for a film. The work is well-preserved for its age.

SAVINA: You can see the drips of paint, which I think are really pretty amazing. He probably painted it in an hour and a half.

ROSE: The mural dates back to 1983 or '84. At the time, Grace House was a home for Catholic teenagers. It was apparently 6 their idea to invite Keith Haring to paint in the stairwell. By then, Haring was already a star. But he spent every moment he could painting outside on walls or in the subway, as he told NPR in 1983.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

KEITH HARING: It's always the most pure situation for someone coming across it or running into it and not knowing where it came from, or how it got there, or if it's even supposed to be art.

ROSE: Haring did not necessarily intend for those public works to last.

ELISABETH SUSSMAN: The fact that it's survived and it's survived where he intended it to be is a miracle.

ROSE: That's why the Grace House mural is so precious, says Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

SUSSMAN: It's the real thing from that era that represents the art world sort of at its best moment - the energy of Keith Haring, his connecting across kind of the New York class divisions. It's all there in that mural.

ROSE: Today, Keith Haring's paintings are worth millions of dollars. But this mural was largely forgotten. Grace House is still owned by Church of the Ascension around the corner. But the church, according to tenant 7 Robert Savina, wants to sell it.

SAVINA: In the spring, we got an official letter from the church stating that they were planning on selling the building because they couldn't afford to keep it up. It's not a rich parish.

ROSE: Most of the tenants 8 moved out by the beginning of August, but Savina stayed. So did Yana Sabeva. She says a local non-profit is backing their effort to remain in their homes.

YANA SABEVA: We're trying to fight for as much time as possible.

ROSE: Both she and Robert Savina concede this is partly about cheap rent. But he insists it's also about the future of the mural and the legacy 9 of an artist who died of complications from AIDS in 1990.

SAVINA: My fear, and I think other peoples' fear, is that if they sold the building that anybody could really come in and just tear the building down. It didn't seem to be that there was any forethought in - how do we preserve the mural?

ROSE: Do you think there's an obligation to preserve it?

SAVINA: It's just such a big question because it's - Keith Haring is such a huge part of New York history. He represented so much to so many people and so much to the gay community in a time, and especially in New York, when so many of our contemporaries were dying. So in that regard, I feel really strongly that it's an essential piece of art history that should be preserved.

ROSE: The church declined an interview request for this story. In a statement, a spokesman for the archdiocese says, quote, "we are aware of the mural and the concern for its preservation," unquote. The church says it hasn't decided 10 what to do with the building, but the tenants say they've seen a realtor showing Grace House to what appeared to be potential buyers. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.