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Keith Haring’s subway drawings were never meant to be preserved or sold. But in the early 1980s, the collector Larry Warsh began an obsessive and diligent pursuit to track them down. It paid off in a great immersive show at Sotheby’s last November that earned $9.2 million for the group.

The subway drawings were the beginning of Haring’s emergence as a major artistic talent with extraordinary public impact, and two important shows will highlight that work next year. In the spring, the Brant Foundation in the East Village will focus on the artist’s formative years of 1980-83, and writer Glenn Adamson is curating a show at Crystal Bridges, to open around the same time, highlighting Haring’s work on three-dimensional objects. If you want a taste of what will be in that show—TVs, rocking horses, cars, decorative columns, and more, all festooned with Haring’s signature manic motifs—check out the fiberglass vase that Warsh loaned to Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties show, which runs through December 13.

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With all of that going on, I was excited to learn last week that Gladstone gallery had opened Liberating the Soul: Keith Haring’s Paintings, a show of eight pieces from the artist’s foundation, more than a decade after the gallery’s last show featuring his work. It’s rare to see a really great show of Haring’s work—the last I can think of at a museum was the Broad’s Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody from two years ago. One reason is that the best collectors hold on to his works, and the Keith Haring Foundation, to which the artist left his estate, still has some of the greatest pieces. Since 1990, despite not having much in the way of cash assets at the beginning, the foundation has made grants of more than $43 million to educational and HIV/AIDS-related nonprofits, helped by growing revenue from licensing Haring’s still-popular imagery.

Not everything in the Gladstone show is for sale; the gallery would prefer to focus on the way the show highlights Haring’s practice, which it certainly does. Also, as Warsh told me, the sales that do happen will be more about placing the artist’s work with great collectors and museums that will continue to raise his stature. Despite Haring’s enduring fame and relevance, after all, his best work is somewhat overlooked by today’s collectors. But there’s a good case to be made that 1980s nostalgia can be an enticement to a new group of collectors who don’t know much about what Haring could really do as an artist. This exhibition shows them.

The Gladstone show consists of half tarpaulins and half works on canvas, including a triangular tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat using the latter’s signature crown motif. That painting and another untitled tarp are made in the color triad of black, white, and red accents. Both reinforce one of the ways we tend to think of Haring—more about line and frenetic forms than color. But on 24th Street you’ll also see six different works notable for their vibrant shades. Tree of Life, from 1985, is a tarpaulin with a Pepto-pink background, a green tree dominating the image, and four yellow figures dancing in the foreground. Unknown (Mother and Child), from 1984, is all reds and oranges on a black background. Brazil, from 1989, is orange and black with an empty blue space where the image falls apart.

Phallic images were a favorite theme for Haring, whose sexuality was never in doubt or something he felt any shame about. Two of the works in the show confront the viewer with male sexuality in ways that may still discomfort collectors or museumgoers. There’s an untitled 10-foot-tall work from 1985 whose centerpiece is a large penis. And perhaps the best work in the show depicts two pink male figures engaged in mutual masturbation underneath a huge motto, written in red over a yellow background: “Safe Sex.”

If you had to guess at the time, you might have thought Haring would become the bigger artist in the long run. His art seemed friendlier and more relevant. He had already created the Pop Shop in New York and Tokyo, an early attempt to weave art into street culture and move it beyond the confines of high-value works—years before peers like Jeff Koons, and younger artists such as Takashi Murakami and Kaws, cracked the code for making cheaper work that could be mass produced. Haring’s motto during his life was, “Art is for everyone.” Of course, he died before the explosion of artists’ product collaborations with luxury brands, but the Haring Foundation’s licensing income is only a hint of what Haring might have been able to do had today’s AIDS treatments been available then.

As it is, Haring’s work has barely moved above $5.9 million at auction. Basquiat, on the other hand, has slowly grown into the market’s most dominant artist; his works have several times sold at auction for near or above $100 million, and fetched much higher prices privately. That’s a huge gulf in pricing between the two, but it doesn’t have to stay that wide forever—in fact, the Gladstone show might be able to help shrink it. More to the point, as I mentioned a week or so ago, Basquiat has become an entry point for a new generation of very wealthy collectors. When I asked an auction house leader to tell me what else those buyers look for in the art market, I got sincere equivocation. But they ought to be buying Haring’s best works, too.