KAWS Is Koming to San Francisco for His First Major West Coast Museum Show

The love-him-or-hate-him street artist KAWS (b. 1974), beloved of hypebeasts everywhere, will get a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It will be the first West Coast museum exhibition for the 50-year-old artist, real name Brian Donnelly, who was born in Jersey City and lives in Brooklyn.

The exhibition, “KAWS: Family,” is a traveling show organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

KAWS is a polarizing figure in the art world, having built his success not in blue chip art galleries or on the auction block—although he’s since had plenty of both—but in the graffiti scene and with sales of his figurines, clothing, and other collectibles.

His cartoon-like characters, instantly identifiable by their skull and cross-bone-shaped heads and the signature Xs drawn across their eyes, are all appropriations. There is KAWS’s take on Mickey Mouse, called Companion; his Elmo-like sidekick, known as BFF; and the Michelin Man-esque Chum, as well as the Simpsons, rebranded the “Kimpsons.”

“We are delighted to bring KAWS’s family of characters to the Bay Area with this exhibition. Referencing iconic animated figures and posed in ways that strike at the heart of human emotion, KAWS’s characters are inherently relatable,” Daryl McCurdy, SFMOMA’s curatorial associate of architecture and design, told me in an email. “From diehard fans to those experiencing the artist’s work for the first time, visitors will be surrounded by the feelings and culture that connects us.”

The artist does imbue his work with emotion. Many of his compositions are about love and loss, expressed through the bonds between Companion and BFF in surprisingly tender fashion. But it can be hard to take KAWS and his cartoonish aesthetic seriously—there’s a reason my colleague Annie Armstrong recently chose him as one of the prime examples of what she’s dubbed red-chip art, a bro-y sub genre of works that appeal in part because they look cheap, toylike, and mass-produced, with visual appeal that translates easily on digital screens.

When my colleague Ben Davis attempted to explain the appeals of KAWS, he wrote that while it fit neatly into our “era of reboots and remakes, of regurgitated intellectual property,” “the work’s very vacantness seems to suggest a low-level depression running through society, so pervasive that it serves as a neutral sign of the art’s nowness, rather than reading as a personal feeling expressed by the artist.”

KAWS has his origins in the graffiti world—his moniker a tag he chose as a teenager writing in Manhattan because he liked the way the letters looked together. The Companion has its origins in advertisements KAWS would deface. In the decades since, flat planes of bold, saturated color and strong lines have remained characteristic of his works. On a trip to Japan in 1999, the artist, who had graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts, began making his first collectible toys of the Companion.

Something about the work resonated, and KAWS quickly began making inroads with the fashion and hip hop communities. Commissions for life-size Companion sculptures—now popular office lobby art—came rolling in. Showing an impressive business savviness, he struck deals with design and fashion brands to create everything from skateboard decks to sneakers, attracting celebrity fans like Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, and Kendall Jenner. Kanye West even tapped KAWS to do the cover art for his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak.

The popularity and desirability of KAWS merchandise is perhaps best illustrated by the 2019 drop of a KAWS UNIQLO collaboration that sparked literal riots in stores in China among frenzied shoppers eager to secure their loot.

But the artist also slowly built up his presence in the art world, starting with a small show at Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2010. The Brooklyn Museum was another early adopter, thanks to the gift of an 18-foot-tall sculpture of two wooden Companion figures, titled , in 2015—the same year Swizz Beatz joined the board. It made its debut as part of a small lobby show with two paintings, followed up by a major survey show, “KAWS: What Party,” in 2021. (The giant statue remains a fixture in the museum’s lobby to this day.)

And even at museums, KAWS’s work was well-positioned to gain audiences that might not normally engage with art museums. In 2022, an outing at London’s Serpentine Galleries included a virtual exhibition component hosted by the online video game . Though art critics were largely unmoved, the response from gamers was overwhelmingly positive.

KAWS has also staged a series of high-profile public art installations of monumental sculptures, including a 115-foot-long inflatable Companion floating in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor in 2019, and a 150-foot-long figure lying on the ground beside Indonesia’s Prambanan Temple in 2023. During lockdown, he even launched an augmented reality version, “COMPANION (EXPANDED),” in 11 cities around the world.

But for art world insiders, KAWS began to appear on the radar in 2018, when his sales at auction began to heat up. He broke the $1 million barrier for the first time, and then four more times, selling his 20 most-expensive works on the block to date for a total of $33.8 million on the year, according to the Artnet Price Database.

That December, at Art Basel Miami Beach, Pace Prints instituted a lottery system to manage sales of a new $65,000 KAWS print that promptly sold out.

It was a harbinger of a bigger moment still to come: the HK$115.9 million ($14.8 million) sale of at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in April 2019. The painting, which was expected to sell for just HK$8 million ($1 million), is the artist’s rendition of , a spoof by of the Beatles’ famous 1967 album cover. (Soon after, the artist dropped longtime dealer Perrotin, which has locations in Paris, New York, and Asia, for Skarstedt, of New York, Paris, and London.)

For the art world, there was officially no more ignoring KAWS. The artist has continued his success in both lanes, with projects including a Companion watch from Audemars Piguet in 2024 as well as a show featuring his own personal collection at New York’s Drawing Center that closed in January. (Donnelly’s perhaps surprisingly refined tastes include a penchant for Outsider Art and Peter Saul [b. 1934].)

Bringing the KAWS show to SFMOMA is something of a surprising choice for museum director Christopher Bedford, who came to the institution from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022.

There, Bedford had made a name for himself for his progressive efforts to diversify the collection, controversially deaccessioning works by white men to raise funds to buy works by artists of color and women. (SFMOMA and the AGO actually took similar measures.) In 2020, the museum pledged to only acquire art by women. Bedford later cancelled even more divisive plan to sell paintings by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol to fund diversity initiatives.

Bedford’s appointment seemed indicative of SFMOMA’s commitment to expanding the canon. When the museum completed a massive expansion in 2016, it unveiled the new Fisher Collection galleries. Under the terms of its donation, three-quarters of those rooms are dedicated to showcasing the contemporary art collection of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher. Those works, representing a veritable who’s-who of 20th-century American art history, are almost exclusively by white men.

In contrast, Bedford’s tenure to date has seen a string of solo shows for women of color (some of which were planned before his appointment) including Zanele Muholi (b. 1972), Pacita Abad (1946–2004), Hung Liu (1948–2021), Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976), Sadie Barnette (b. 1984), and Amy Sherald (b. 1973), the last of which just traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Currently, SFMOMA is hosting a large Kara Walker (b. 1969) installation and the first posthumous retrospective for Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), with the first major retrospective for Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944) set to open in the fall.

But the museum is also under pressure to reverse a significant drop in attendance from before the pandemic. Nearly 900,000 visitors in 2019 were down to about 600,000 in 2024. Last June, Bedford spoke with the about strategies for bringing in bigger audiences, including the museum’s sports-themed “Get in the Game,” show which featured interactive ping pong and foosball table sculptures, among other works.

“We are attempting, without a compromise in scholarship, to meet people more where they are in terms of their interests,” he said.

With KAWS’s built-in audience of fanboys, including 4.4 million Instagram followers, he certainly would fit the bill. He is mainstream in a way most artists could never dream of, and one of few artists working today with widespread name recognition.

“KAWS has a distinct appeal to a vast array of audiences with his iconic characters and meticulous work in a stunning range of mediums,” Bedford said in a statement. “The playful and contemplative works—a dynamic blend of his street art practice and formal education—will offer something for everyone.”

Spanning over 30 years of work, the show will include over 100 artworks, with paintings and sculptures as well as KAWS product collaborations and collectibles. There will be cereal boxes, sneakers, and album covers, as well as one of the loveseats KAWS made with Brazilian design studio Estúdio Campana using stuffed animals as upholstery.

The blockbuster potential of the 2021 Brooklyn Museum KAWS exhibition was limited by COVID-era capacity and social distancing restrictions, but the show still drew over 150,000 people. Tickets sold out, with a burgeoning resale market from scalpers on eBay, according to the . At AGO, “KAWS: Family” had 426,660 visitors during its nearly year-long run.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com