In June 1986, Keith Haring joined around 1,000 young people at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to make a banner too large to take in at a glance. Across three days, his black outlines became a 90-by-30-foot Statue of Liberty, surrounded and filled by the drawings, names and messages of the CityKids participants. Forty years later, that collective work is the starting point for a new print and canvas collection released by ICONIC in partnership with CityKids on October 28, 2026.
Titled CityKids Speak on Liberty: The People’s Masterpiece, the release brings sections of the original banner into smaller formats while keeping the young contributors’ marks visible. The details matter here: within Haring’s broad, immediately recognisable lines are hundreds of individual gestures, each responding to the idea of freedom.
A public artwork built by a thousand hands
The banner was made for the Statue of Liberty’s centennial and first displayed at Liberty Tower in Battery Park City on July 4, 1986. Haring provided the framework, but the young people made its surface their own. Viewed from a distance, the statue and the figures around her hold together as a single image. Move closer and the composition breaks into handwriting, faces, symbols and colour, recording the people who took part.
That relationship between a recognisable image and an open invitation to participate sits at the heart of the project. Haring’s line gave the work its structure without smoothing away the differences between its contributors. The banner carries the unevenness and energy of a shared painting session, with no attempt to make every hand look alike.
Its public life continued long after the centennial. The banner appeared as a backdrop for Paul McCartney’s performance of “Freedom” at the 2002 Super Bowl pregame ceremony, travelled to Tour Paris 13 in 2013, and was unfurled at Liberty State Park in 2015. In 2020, it was digitised at full scale in a Brooklyn warehouse, allowing its dense surface to be examined in detail.
From the banner to the editions
The new collection includes four large-format prints: The Liberty Torch, The Face of Liberty, We The People I and We The People II. Each is offered in an edition of 100 at $1,250. Two paired collector sets are priced at $2,100, while a $350 open-edition print presents the complete composition. Two made-to-order canvas versions are available at $5,000 each.
The paper editions use archival pigment printing on Hahnemühle paper and carry an embossed CityKids logo; the limited editions are hand-numbered. These are new reproductions of the collaborative 1986 artwork. Haring’s “KH86” mark, visible within selected compositions, is reproduced from the original banner rather than a newly applied signature.
A portion of proceeds supports The CityKids Foundation’s youth arts, education and leadership work. Founded by Laurie Meadoff in 1985, the New York organisation gave the original participants a place to speak through art. The release returns attention to those contributors as well as to Haring: their names and drawings remain inseparable from the image.
The collection is available through ICONIC. For more on Haring’s continuing presence on the street, revisit the Haring and Basquiat tribute mural in Melbourne and Owen Dippie’s Haring tribute in Bushwick.