Javier Porto & Ricky Powell: "The Incredible Keith”

The 1980s were a particularly vibrant moment for New York’s art world. Pop Art had been a thing in the 1960s, but after nearly a decade of Conceptualism and Minimalism during the 1970s, Pop came roaring back, this time enlivened by hip-hop, graffiti and the downtown club scene. Probably no artist embodied the zeitgeist better than Keith Haring, who went from doing drawings in the subway to showing in the hottest galleries of the day. It was during this period that Javier Porto and Ricky Powell, two photographers working independently, captured Haring and his milieu, including ’80s luminaries such as Grace Jones, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol.