In a time of immense social unease, the Apocalypse series is strikingly relevant — it is complex and chaotic, but that complexity and chaos is the point.
by Eman Sadiq
In December 2024, the art series Apocalypse (1988), brain-child of beatnik William S. Burroughs and artist Keith Haring, was donated to the City College of New York (CCNY) by the Leonard-Litz LGBTQ+ Foundation. Apocalypse comprises ten works of art by Haring paired with writing by Burroughs. On March 4, 2025, CCNY unveiled all ten pieces and held an event honoring the artists’ uniquely layered and reflective body of work. Five of the pieces are now on permanent display at CCNY’s LGBTQ+ Student Center.
Just before his work on Apocalypse, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS, and it’s clear that this diagnosis played a role in the series’ themes. Certainly, Apocalypse is colored in a darker hue than Haring’s famed subway drawings. Even if Haring’s art style is distinctive, Apocalypse is especially jarring, partly because it is as much of a social critique as it is an ambitious artistic undertaking. The work features existential conflicts between religion and society, life and death, sex and disease, joy and destruction.
The very title of the collection seems to despair for a doomed present and lost future; the titular “apocalypse” most literally refers to the havoc wreaked by not only AIDS but also a health department and federal government neglecting work on life-saving drug treatment. Yet the term “apocalypse,” from the perspective of Haring and Burroughs, was also a dig at the doomsaying narrative so popular at the time — a narrative infused with vitriol toward the LGBTQ+ community. For Haring, Apocalypse reified into art AIDS patients’ feelings of helplessness, while Burroughs’s accompanying written reflections articulate a singularly man-made apocalypse:
“The final Apocalypse is when every man sees what he sees, feels what he feels, and hears what he hears. The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be, electric vitality of careening subways faster faster faster stations flash by in a blur.
Pan God of Panic, whips screaming crowds, as millions of faces look up at the torn sky:
OFF THE TRACK! OFF THE TRACK!”
For modern-day viewers of Apocalypse, the value of Haring and Burroughs’s work may not seem immediately explicit. However, inherent to Apocalypse is a clear acknowledgement of both societal and governmental failings, and this awareness offers a potent point of reflection. The last line of Burroughs’s writing for Apocalypse’s tenth and final print invokes the ancient Greek god Pan: “Caught in New York beneath the animals of the village, the Piper pulled down the sky.” Burroughs recognizes Pan principally as “God of Panic,” though the reference to Pan runs deeper than disorder and chaos. Among other things, the “death” of Pan, as popularized by early Roman writers like Plutarch, was regarded as coincident with the rise of a Christian order. Ironically, Apocalypse plays on religious themes in a way that suggests Christianity’s (and religion’s) contradictory coexistence with violence and destruction, making invocations of Pan ironic yet intentional.
Apocalypse’s disturbing imagery is analogous to the instability of today’s world. It seems that we inhabit an increasingly pre-apocalyptic America where both physical and metaphorical storms ravage cities and where government serves as a bulwark protecting not its wider citizenry but the interests of a select few. AIDS activists in 1988 marched with the slogan “Silence = Death.” Today, those words ring just as true, even if the death in question is not necessarily physical. The enduring appeal of Apocalypse lies in its purposeful accentuation of conflict, pain, and division — in a society unmoored from reason and empathy, Haring’s symbolic prints and Burroughs’s visceral descriptions speak to Apocalypse’s power as not just a moving work of art but also a valuable social commentary.
Lucas Andahl, an Art History graduate student at CCNY who helped organize the Apocalypse exhibit space, hopes that the series pushes students to “channel any of their emotions during this time into forms of creative expression, pursuit for activism and a drive to continue to learn about the history in hopes to change the future.” For Andahl, the exhibition of Apocalypse is incredibly timely and mirrors the tumult of our current political discourse, “in which it can feel very apocalyptic every day,” especially when “witnessing the attack on the LGBTQ+ communities, as well as the attempt to erase programs that foster diversity, equity and inclusion.” Through Apocalypse, Andahl hopes students understand that “through art, activism and collaboration we can project our voices to initiate change,” just as Burroughs and Haring — in the midst of their fraught political moment — expressed “scenes of chaos, destruction, and despair” along with “imagery of hope, strength, and perseverance.” Following Haring and Burroughs’s example, employing creativity to propel societally-minded action is certainly a meaningful goal, whether you’re living in 1988 or in 2025.