The collector at 60 White.
In 1989, at a restaurant on Broadway, a young man who had just moved to New York shook Keith Haring's hand at what turned out to be Haring's last birthday. He did not own a single piece of art yet. Thirty-five years later he holds one of the deepest private collections of Haring anywhere, and this summer he hung a large part of it three blocks from here, on White Street.
His name is Lio Malca.
Malca came to New York from Colombia around 1990. He had studied in the States and did not want to go home. 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 is how my collection started," he says. He never met Basquiat, who died in 1988. Haring he met exactly once, that night on Broadway. Both became the spine of everything he collected after.
He collects, in his words, "by instinct," and he does not treat it as investment. "I like to breathe the art that I collect," he told WhiteWall. "We are temporary custodians rather than permanent owners." 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 and no gift shop. He sold a Basquiat he had held for years to help buy a half-finished mansion in Tulum that had once belonged to Pablo Escobar, and reopened it as an art hotel. 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 free to walk into, Tuesday through Saturday.
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 full-scale recreation of DV8 inside the gallery, black-light paintings and all, 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 early September 2026. Tuesday to Saturday, 10 to 6. Free.
Sources
Everything above is linked in place. The full list, for anyone who wants to check the work.