Conservative Legal Group Targets Upstate New York School over ‘Pornographic’ Keith Haring Artworks

After a teacher at an Upstate New York middle school asked students to visit the Keith Haring Foundation’s website for an assignment, a prominent conservative legal group got involved, claiming that children were “forced: to look at imagery that the organization termed “pornographic,” without specifying what that imagery was.

The American Center for Law and Justice said in late November that 7th graders at Case Middle School in Watertown, New York, were assigned to look at an “unvetted website containing graphic sexual images as part of an art project.” The website was that of the Haring Foundation, according to a letter sent by the ACLJ to the school.

In so doing, the school “violated the constitutional rights of parents and traumatized children,” per the ACLJ’s release.

On its website, the ACLJ has repeatedly spoken out against abortion rights, denounced “anti-Israel” causes, and issued many news releases about Donald Trump, whose legal team included longtime ACLJ chief counsel Jay Sekulow during his first administration.

It wasn’t clear which artworks students encountered by Haring, whose art of the 1980s directly addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay rights. (Haring died in 1990 of AIDS-related causes.) Though widely known today for iconic symbols such as the Radiant Baby, Haring also produced a range of images that featured sexually explicit subject matter. In 2016, a publishing house even put out a book of his so-called “penis drawings.”

The Haring Foundation’s website does feature images of these artworks with sexual material, though they are not put front and center. The foundation also operates a secondary website, HaringKids.com, that is billed as a “fun and safe place for children” and hosts lesson plans for teachers. Articles featuring images and descriptions of sex acts on the main Haring Foundation site are tagged with warnings that these pages are for mature audiences.

In September, 7 News reported that the Case Middle School students were being taught about Haring’s life and art, and were sent a link to the Haring Foundation site. After parents complained, the school reportedly put an art teacher on administrative leave and promised an investigation.

According to a letter from the ACLJ to Case Middle School dated November 21, the students were assigned to analyze and sketch two artworks by Haring produced between 1980 and 1990. The students were not asked to look at specific works, however.

This week, 7 News ran a follow-up report on ACLJ’s involvement in the matter at the urging of at least two parents of children at the school. In that report, the publication quoted the president of a local teachers union, who said that there was a “chasm of difference between an honest mistake and intentional actions.”

Nathan Moelker, a senior attorney at the ACLJ, told 7 News that “children have been exposed to something in school that they never would have wanted their children exposed to.” A release about the ACLJ’s involvement said that one of the organization’s clients was Stephanie Boyanski, a parent who previously told 7 News, “The kids had to view these images to get to other images they could use for their project and their sketches, so there was no way around for these kids not to view these images.”

The matter has since gone viral with conservative outlets such as Libs of TikTok, whose X post about the dispute has now gained more than 6,000 likes. Using similar language to the ACLJ, Libs of TikTok claimed that the 7th graders had seen “p*rnographic images as part of an ‘art lesson.’”

Representatives for the Haring Foundation, Case Middle School, and the ACLJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment.