The collector at 60 White.
In 1989, at a restaurant on Broadway, a young man who had recently arrived in New York shook Keith Haring's hand at what turned out to be Haring's last birthday. He was just starting out as a collector. Decades later he holds a major private collection of Haring, and this year he hung a large part of it on White Street in Tribeca.
His name is Lio Malca.
Malca, born in Colombia, first came to New York in 1988 or 1989 and settled there for good in 1990. He had studied in Boston and spent his weekends in New York. What he found downtown was a generation of artists the establishment had not caught up to yet: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, George Condo. He bought his first Basquiat drawing in Boston. "That's how my collection started," he told Arterritory in 2016. He never met Basquiat, who died in 1988. Haring he met at that party on Broadway. Both became the spine of everything he collected after.
He collects, in his words, "by instinct," and, as he told WhiteWall, not just as investment. "I like to breathe the art that I collect," he told WhiteWall. "We are temporary custodians rather than permanent owners," he told Art Plugged in 2026. The collection grew to hold Warhol, KAWS, and more than a hundred works by Pedro Friedeberg, but Haring and Basquiat stayed closest.
He has done unlikely things with it. He turned a former salt warehouse in the Ibiza salt flats into a free public gallery, La Nave Salinas, and keeps it open with no admission fee. He sold a Basquiat to help buy an abandoned Tulum estate that had once belonged to Pablo Escobar, and reopened it as an art hotel, Casa Malca. The through-line is that he keeps putting the work in front of people instead of in storage.
60 White Street is the New York version of that instinct. He opened it in 2023, in an 1869 building, and had the architects at studioMDA strip it back to a triple-height room with exposed brick, a thirty-five-foot wall, and skylights at the back. "I envisioned a place where people could come together to experience art in all its forms," he said. It is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, according to 60 White.
A world in motion
The current show is the reason to go now. "Keith Haring: A World in Motion," curated by Carlo McCormick with Malca, takes the one thing everyone thinks they know about Haring, that he is a New York artist, and follows him out of the city. The work was made in Tokyo, Paris, Milan, and San Francisco. There is a drawing Haring made in the Alma-Marceau Métro station in Paris in 1984. There is his 1985 Sister Cities painting linking New York and Tokyo. And there is the full five-panel mural he painted for a San Francisco nightclub called DV8.
The centerpiece is the nightclub itself. Malca and McCormick built a recreation of DV8 inside the gallery, with works that glow in black light, so you enter it the way people entered it in the eighties. It is the part of the show that explains why Haring belongs here in particular. He never separated the art from the music, the club, the street, or the crowd. Neither did the neighborhood this site is about.
"Haring did not simply travel the world, he entered into dialogue with it," McCormick says. Malca puts it more plainly: "Keith Haring's work is rooted in New York, but it belongs to the world."
He shook Haring's hand once, in 1989, and never got to do it again. A room like this is the closest thing to keeping the conversation going.
60 White Street. "Keith Haring: A World in Motion," through November 25, 2026. Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, per sixtywhite.com. Check before you go.
Sources
Everything above is linked in place. The full list, for anyone who wants to check the work.