The Williamsburg studio of the artist known as KAWS is neatly lined with racks of acrylic-paint bottles in primary colors and guarded by a cluster of standing toy collectibles—life-size 3-D comic book characters of his own design—like a platoon of robot children. By the window, there is a small-scale model of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Connecticut. KAWS, an unassuming, soft-spoken 35-year-old New Jersey native named Brian Donnelly, is plotting his first solo museum show at the Aldrich next month. It will serve as the unofficial grand induction to the institutionalized art world for the graffiti artist, painter, illustrator, sculptor, toymaker, and product designer. Yet KAWS has a long history outside of the white cube. His street-born cartoonish graphics—specifically spermatozoa-shaped figures with x-ed out eyes—have achieved a subcultural iconography. He has applied this KAWS signature to his street art, a clothing line, heroically outsize toys and sculptures, and countless cobranding ventures with labels like A Bathing Ape and Marc Jacobs.
KAWS was a teenager growing up in Jersey City in the late ’80s and early ’90s, where he spent his high school years graffiti-bombing trains, walls, and billboards. He honed his street-art act in New York City, hanging out with the spray can–wielding skate kids in downtown Manhattan. He graduated to a more covert form of interventionist street art in the mid-’90s, when he began unlocking the glass panels encasing bus stop and phone booth ads. He stole the posters, added his own graphics to them in acrylic paint, and then surreptitiously put them back. These hits were so skillfully executed—brushstrokes are never apparent in a KAWS painting—that often no one could distinguish the artist’s work from the original advertisement.
After graduating from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1996, KAWS traveled to Japan, pursuing his street-art projects with Tokyo subculture heavyweights Hectic and Jun Takahashi of Undercover. In 1999, KAWS made his first toy with Japanese company Bounty Hunter,a vinyl figure of Mickey Mouse with x-ed out eyes (as if Mickey just drank from a bottle marked POISON). Nigo, the tastemaker behind A Bathing Ape, asked KAWS to collaborate on a clothing line in 2001 and began collecting his pop paintings of cartoon characters like the Simpsons, the Smurfs, and SpongeBob SquarePants.
Channeling the commercialist attitude of Claes Oldenburg and, more recently, Takashi Murakami, KAWS has produced everything from x-marked sneakers for Nike to an album cover for a special edition of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak (2008). To sell all the KAWS-mobilia, the artist opened a dazzling Masamichi Katayama–designed store in Tokyo in 2006 called OriginalFake. Although KAWS does not separate product from art or art from product, it was only a matter of time before the art world caught up with him. He found Los Angeles–based dealer Honor Fraser, who took on not only the paintings but the whole breadth of his work.
With a monograph from Skira/Rizzoli due out this fall and the Aldrich show at his doorstep, KAWS has gotten approval from an art-world establishment that he felt would never take his guerrilla act as its own. He bought a building not far from his Brooklyn studio, which his good friend, the interior designer Katayama, will convert into a massive studio that will become the creative hub of the KAWS universe. That’s all in the future, but it is one KAWS can see from the seventh-floor window of his current studio—which is where the actor Tobey Maguire, a fan, friend, and collector, interviewed the artist.
They started doing those full-building billboards down Houston, taking over walls that had been covered in graffiti for years. It became a focal point for me to take back some of those spots.
—KAWS
Click here to read 1-on-1 Interview: KAWS & TOBEY MAGUIER INTERVIEW
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