Is KAWS an artist for the ages? Any artist who works with appropriated pop culture is going to be compared to Andy Warhol. But put it this way: He’s probably less a new-model Andy Warhol than a new-model Peter Max. KAWS’s new works speak powerfully to the isolation, fears, and grief of our times,” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum. “It reminds us that there’s a universality to our suffering.”

KAWS: WHAT PARTY highlights five overarching tenets of the artist’s evolving artistic practice. The first section brings together examples of KAWS’s earliest work, including graffiti drawings and notebooks from the early 1990s, on view for the first time in the United States. These works are accompanied by the artist’s early-career altered bus shelter and phone booth advertisements, which first brought him notoriety, as well as a collection of multimedia works that provide glimpses into his studio practice. The Brooklyn Museum and KAWS have been working together since 2015, and we’re excited to further that relationship by presenting his first mid-career survey in the U.S.,” says Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, and curator of KAWS: WHAT PARTY. “While participating in a cultural environment shaped by image and consumption, KAWS simultaneously emphasizes the constant presence of universal emotions in his work, such as love, friendship, loneliness, and alienation—an emphasis that is now more important and relevant than ever before.” KAWS (b. 1974, Jersey City, New Jersey; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has exhibited extensively in renowned institutions, including solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha, Qatar (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2019); Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri (2017); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2016), which traveled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Longside Gallery, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2016); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain (2014); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (2013); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2013); High Art Museum, Atlanta, Georgia (2011); and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2011).In glass vitrines, there are countless figurines and toys (including his Kaws MTV Moonman from 2013, which was used for the MTV Video Music awards and held in the hands of winners like Justin Timberlake), as well as his designs for Comme des Garçons wallets and Vans sneakers. KAWS: WHAT PARTY traces KAWS’s twenty-five-year career, from his beginnings as a graffiti writer in Jersey City to his current status as a globally acclaimed artist based in Brooklyn. The exhibition highlights his wide-ranging practice, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, product design, large-scale public projects, and augmented reality (AR) work. KAWS is the alias of Brian Donnelly (American, born 1974), who chose the name based on the graphic possibilities presented by the four letters. Through vibrant paintings and sculptures of familiar pop culture–inspired characters, fashion and product design, and the incorporation of AR as an artistic medium, KAWS’s practice interweaves aspects drawn from the distinctive worlds of art, popular culture, commerce, and technology, shifting how we think about cultural production and consumption. Claes Oldenburg has made many great public artworks, as well as smaller, more intimate objects and editions,” said Donnelly. “His use of scale to distort the viewers relationship to the work, as well as his choice of materials, was absolutely brilliant.” The title of the exhibition, What Party, sounds like the anthem for 2021 (there are no parties anywhere, what party?). That phrase means something different to the artist today, just as it does to have an exhibition despite the state the world with the ongoing pandemic. KAWS’s start as a graffiti writer—tagging (writing on) physical surfaces in public spaces without license or permission—occupies a significant place in his artistic formation. Throughout the 1990s, KAWS left his mark on walls, freight trains, and billboards, sometimes working solo and sometimes collaborating with a crew. These early years laid the foundation for much of his subsequent practice, which uses large-scale, bold gestures to make an impact on urban and natural landscapes (as seen in his recent HOLIDAY series, on view in this exhibition).

For the past two decades, KAWS’s artistic production has questioned many of the long-held assumptions about art and culture, especially the concepts of exclusivity and inaccessibility. By creating objects that are both toys and sculpture, making fine art in collaboration with retail businesses, selling works online and in galleries, and creating large-scale projects and events outside the art world proper, KAWS has leveled some of the conventional hierarchies of the art world, democratizing and enlarging the possibilities of culture in ways that are relevant to the twenty-first century. He includes early work in this exhibition that traces his roots, the sort of stuff that typically is not seen as high art today. “I’m happy I have sketch books and pictures of graffiti walls from the early 1990s in the show, so many people put that stuff away or say, ‘This is the point where I became a professional artist,’” he said. “But that whole time when I was painting walls and freight trains, that was painting. I was thinking about visual compositions in terms of color and scale, things I think about now.” KAWS’s roots as a graffiti writer and street artist laid the groundwork for his creative vision, which has unfolded largely outside the established art world and grows out of a keen appreciation of public space, both real and virtual, as a platform for reaching an expanded audience. His early work, in the 1990s, began with tagging or writing his alias on walls, train cars, and billboards, and evolved into more pointed public interventions involving manipulating advertisements. Often KAWS added his distinctive logo of a skull and crossbones, with Xed-out eyes.

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For twenty-five years, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly, American, born 1974) has bridged the worlds of art, popular culture, and commerce. Adapting the rules of cultural production and consumption in the twenty-first century, his practice both critiques and participates in consumer culture. KAWS: WHAT PARTY is a sweeping survey featuring more than one hundred broad-ranging works, such as rarely seen graffiti drawings and notebooks, paintings and sculptures, smaller collectibles, furniture, and monumental installations of his popular COMPANION figures. Italso features new pieces made uniquely for the exhibition along with his early-career altered advertisements. One groundbreaking piece is themed around his experience of getting Covid-19. The piece, entitled Urge (Kub2) was created in 2020, and details the artist’s interpretation of being in bed for three weeks with the virus. It shows his Chum character, having different colored paws over his torso and face, signifying “touching and contaminating”, said the artist.