[4] This anti-adultist artistic collaboration was a form of youth-adult partnership undertaken at Haring's studio in New York City and coincided with the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) at the United Nations General Assembly, also in New York City.
The UN General Assembly adopted the Convention and opened it for signature on 20 November 1989 (the 30th anniversary of its Declaration of the Rights of the Child).
[6] The United States of America did not sign the convention until 16 February 1995, exactly five years later, and remains to the present day the only country in the world not to have ratified the UNCRC.
[5] Philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes Émile, or On Education (1762) which rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, and asserts that children are innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world.
Romantics such as painter Caspar David Friedrich along with writers including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge promoted the idea that children could see the 'truth of nature' thanks to their "naive" perspective on the world.
John Ruskin in his The Elements of Drawing (1857) encouraged artists to maintain an 'innocence of the eye', a freshness of vision that he called the 'condition of childhood'.
Children's Art has been admired by artists and used as inspiration recurrently, including: From the late 19th century, Primitivists viewed childhood as the 'primitive' prehistory of the adult.
[3] In the 20th century, artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Jean Dubuffet avidly collected, studied and in some instances took quite specific cues from children's art.
— Keith Haring[9]An exhibition of children's art from the classes of artist Franz Cižek was included in the Kunstschau Wien 1908.
However, Haring's collaboration was intended to champion the artistic value of children's creative expression and so actively counter adultism within the art world, especially within high art, by offering equal artistic credit and status to Kalish, whilst Haring was at the height of his career.
The two would pass preliminary works back and forth as they made progress, importantly with Haring offering as much credit to Kalish as to himself.
Part of the reason Keith chose etching as a medium for their collaboration was because Sean was not interested in color.
— Sean Kalish[11]"Children are bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form" — Keith Haring[12]Proofed and printed in an edition of 33, by Master printmaker Richard Spare at his Wellington Studios in London, England.
So besides contemporaries such as Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol and Walt Disney — Haring found inspiration in the Modern masters".
"He talked about how liberating he found the art of Pierre Alechinsky, Jean Dubuffet and Pablo Picasso, and how he united that free form in his work."
— Frank Verpoorten, Executive Director, Naples Art Institute[41](2019–) Young Artists' Summer Show, a free annual open submission exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, for young artists aged 4–19 years studying in the UK.