On Friday, the Brooklyn Museum unveils Keith Haring: 1978-1982, the first large-scale exhibition to explore the early career of the legendary queer artist. Curated by Raphaela Platow, the exhibit traces the development of Haring’s visual vocabulary with 155 works on paper and videos as well as 150 archival objects—sketchbooks journals, flyers for exhibits, posters, subway sketches and documentary style photographs.

Haring was born in 1958 in Reading, PA, and in Pittsburgh, but it was in New York, where he moved in 1978, that he truly blossomed. The exhibition chronicles Haring’s early years in New York, where he worked alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and other emerging artists, creating graffiti and street-style art that inspired a generation of artists and activists, many of whom were involved in ACT UP.

The Brooklyn Museum will show several pieces never before seen in public, including Painting Myself into a Corner, Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt and collages created from cut-up fragments of his own writing, history textbooks, and newspapers. Haring died of complications from AIDS in 1990 at the age of 32.

Click through for artwork from the Brooklyn Museum retrospective on Keith Haring

Keith Haring: 1978-1982 runs from March 16-July 8, 2012. Images courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum