Inside the story of Keith Haring’s fridge, at auction with Madonna’s ‘tag’
Sunday, 09 May 2021
On Wednesday, Guernsey’s will auction off a refrigerator door that belonged to Keith Haring. The object - from the artist’s 1980s apartment at 325 Broome St. downtown - features more than 80 signatures and “tags,” including those believed to be by Madonna and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Even more amazing, the artifact nearly perished before the current owner - who lived in Haring’s old unit in the early 1990s - grabbed it from a back alley before a garbage crew could take it away.
“It’s a one in a million kind of thing,” Guernsey’s president Arlan Ettinger told The Post. (Ettinger said that the piece is being sold “without minimum reserve,” meaning it will go for whatever the highest bid is.)
Haring often had raucous get-togethers at his Soho apartment, and his artistic guests left their marks on every surface of his home, from the brightly painted walls to the front door to his white icebox.
“We tagged everything,” artist Cy Adams told The Post, recalling the crowded, celeb-filled parties Haring would throw at his apartment. “When you’re a young graffiti artist, you don’t even think twice about it.”
Haring moved out of the Broome Street apartment shortly before he died of AIDS in 1990. That’s when the fridge’s current owner, an artist who now lives in San Francisco and wished to remain anonymous, moved in.
She answered found a listing looking for a roommate to share a railroad apartment in Soho for $250 a month. “I was immediately struck by the beautiful light in the front of the flat and the amazing bathroom … [and] the funky kitchen with the fridge covered in graffiti,” the woman told The Post.
When her soon-to-be roommate informed her that the apartment had once belonged to Haring, “I was stunned,” she said. After she moved in, she and her friends would examine it for names they recognizes. When the appliance stopped working, she ran out to retrieve the door after the man who delivered a new one threw it away.
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