You’ve seen Keith Haring’s pop art. Soon you can send mail with it.

A drawing by Keith Haring, the Pennsylvania-born pop artist whose distinctive style became known worldwide before his AIDS-related death in 1990, will become a U.S. postage stamp next year. The stamp will feature an untitled 1985 drawing by Haring of two cartoon figures holding a beating red heart aloft.

“The non-specificity of the figures allows a variety of people to see themselves in this stamp,” Antonio Alcalá, an art director for USPS, said in a statement.

Haring was born in Reading and raised in Kutztown, Pa., where he learned cartoon drawing from his father Allen, an amateur cartoonist and engineer. After high school, Haring enrolled in the commercial Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, before deciding that he had no interest in becoming a commercial artist. He moved to New York City in 1978.

It was there that he became a star, first by chalking illustrations on the unused black paper covering advertising panels in the subway system. His exuberant drawings, of dancing figures, monsters, mazes, and lovers, were so beloved by commuters and art appreciators alike that he had to stop drawing underground — not because his artwork was technically criminal mischief, but because it was suddenly too prized.

“As soon as I would finish something, somebody would rip it down. Nobody was getting to see the stuff,” he told The Inquirer’s art critic, Michael Kimmelman, in 1986.

Through the 1980s, Haring became extraordinarily successful, selling his canvasses for as much as $350,000. He simultaneously sold his art through his retail store, the Pop Shop, where people could buy posters, buttons, and magnets at a much lower price tag.

He also created dozens of public murals throughout the 1980s, including a 300-foot mural on the Berlin Wall, and designed antiapartheid, safe sex, and AIDS awareness posters. An openly gay man, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988.

Even as he became a wealthy artist, Haring faced criticism about the commercialism of his work, with one critic describing it as equivalent to “fast food,” according to his obituary in the Associated Press. For Haring, his retail shop was similar to his subway illustrations, a way of “breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”

Kutztown has claimed Haring and mounted a Pennsylvania Historical Marker in his honor earlier this fall. But Haring felt liberated when he left Pennsylvania.

“I was a square in a round peg,” he told The Inquirer in 1986. “I didn’t really fit into what you’re supposed to be in Kutztown. It’s a little conservative for the way I wanted to lead my life.”

Haring died in 1990, at age 31, from complications related to AIDS. Near the end of his life, he explained why he was still making art.

“All of the things that you make are a kind of quest for immortality,” he said. “Because you’re making these things that you know have a different kind of life.”

He deliberately left his 1989 Unfinished Painting incomplete to denote the void left behind by the lives lost to the AIDS epidemic.