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.

A fully illustrated catalogue, co-published with Phaidon Press, accompaniesthe exhibition. Essayists include Daniel Birnbaum, art critic, curator, and director of Acute Art, and Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. Throughout his twenty-five-year career, KAWS has collaborated with a number of other artists and companies. Through his friend and fellow graffiti writer Stash, founder of the clothing label Subware, KAWS met designers who were integrating art, fashion, and lifestyle into their brands, including Yoshifumi “YOPPI” Egawa of HECTIC, Tomoaki “Nigo” Nagao of the fashion label A Bathing Ape (BAPE), and Hikaru Iwanaga, founder of the toy-design company Bounty Hunter. Nigo provided KAWS with one of his earliest commercial collaborations, which attracted recording artists like Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams to his work. In 1999, working with HECTIC and Bounty Hunter, KAWS produced his first toy, COMPANION. The exhibit starts with a life-sized pink sculpture of his Chum character, which is inspired by the Michelin Man, then goes into a room that shows his old notebooks, photos of his early graffiti tags. It segues into his 1990s ad-busting photos onto bus stop ads and shows a series of paintings featuring altered pop culture figures from The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snoopy and the Smurfs, all of which have X-ed out eyes.Get up close to graffiti drawings, paintings, smaller collectables, furniture, sculptures, and recent augmented reality projects 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. 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.

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.Indeed, it is an offline extravaganza (that will probably end up in a meta stream of online photos). “A lot of times, my work is only witnessed through print format, or online through jpgs, so this is a great opportunity to put original works in front of people.” 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.

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: WHAT PARTY is curated by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. Through these collaborations, KAWS has been able to expand his practice into other creative industries while also broadening the accessibility—both geographically and financially—of his work. In addition to fashion and toys, KAWS has created furniture with the Brazilian design studio Estudio Campana, incorporating his characters into chairs and sofas. KAWS’s largest-scale works to date have been developed in collaboration with AllRightsReserved, a Hong Kong–based creative studio, creating COMPANIONs that dwarf the surrounding architecture in locations such as Hong Kong, Seoul, South Korea, and Virginia Beach in the United States.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 curator Eugenie Tsai says Donnelly’s artwork is a reflection of our times. “Love, friendship, isolation, loneliness, it’s a symbol of our time,” said Tsai. “Today, these themes are more relevant than ever before.”