The latest ‘must have ” additions to LEGO”s Art Line are KEITH HARING’S ‘ Dancing Figures’

For almost 40 years, since the mid-1980s whenever I flew into NY from London, one of my favorite ports of call was The Pop Shop on Lafayette Street in Soho (sadly now closed). KEITH HARING saw the Pop Shop as an extension of his work, a fun boutique where his art could be accessible to everyone. The Shop sold T-shirts and novelty items with Keith’s imagery, as well as some of his contemporaries, like Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat.  It wasn’t just his animated imagery that I loved, but the fact that much of his work included sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. When the pandemic took his life at the beginning of 1990, when he was just 31 years old, it was another major loss to the world

However,  his work lives on and seems just as relevant as ever today.  A thought that is shared by the makers of LEGO  as the latest edition to their Art line is Keith Haring – Dancing Figures  which joins other famous artworks like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Hokusai’s The Great Wave in being transformed into a brick-built version. Made up of more than 1,700 pieces, the building set for adults brings one of Haring’s most iconic motifs to life and “brilliantly captures the bold lines, vibrant colours and distinctive sense of movement and energy”.

The set comes with five building instruction booklets, one for each of the five figures, enabling people to enjoy a “social experience” as part of the build and “create this piece of pop art with friends or family members”.

“Once it’s built, you have two display options and can either hang your frameless LEGO Keith Haring artwork on a wall or connect each figure to a stand and showcase them as you like – the five figures are separate models so you can choose their order and how many you want to display,” LEGO says of the set.

LEGO Art 31216 Keith Haring – Dancing Figures is available on the LEGO website from Thursday (15 May) and is on sale for  UK £104.99 / US $119.99 / CAN $149.99.

In 2014, he was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, a walk of fame noting LGBTQ people who have “made significant contributions in their fields”. In 2019, he was one of the inaugural 50 American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Stonewall Inn.