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. It could potentially give more space to absorb the artwork. “For me, it’s a way to put the work I’ve been making for the past 20 or 25 years, and put it in front of people, and they’ll take from it what they can,” said Donnelly.

Get up close to graffiti drawings, paintings, smaller collectables, furniture, sculptures, and recent augmented reality projectsDonnelly, a Jersey City native, had already made a name for himself as a graffiti artist, under the handle of KAWS. However, that skeleton key, combined with Donnelly's artistic talents, ambition, and feel for the moment, enabled him to open up an entirely new avenue for his work. He began doctoring display advertising, winding his now-distinctive serpentine, cross-eyed characters around posters featuring willowy supermodels, disrupting the world of street art, while also drawing the attention of key figures in the worlds of fashion and fine art. The Brooklyn Museum show, “ KAWS: WHAT PARTY,” does a good job taking KAWS seriously but not too seriously. They could have wasted a lot more time making overblown claims about the work’s profundity to try to justify its significance before the gaze of skeptics like myself. They don’t. 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. KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, street art, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies. 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.

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The concluding section of the exhibition centers on KAWS’s acclaimed COMPANION figure, in a number of forms. First appearing in the artist’s early ad interventions, COMPANION serves as a consistent figurative element throughout his work. On display are a number of newly fabricated COMPANION sculptures from the artist’s popular HOLIDAY project. These are juxtaposed with never-before-seen cinematic short films highlighting HOLIDAY, which saw the installation of monumental inflatable COMPANION figures in Seoul, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, as well as a virtual installation in outer space. The result is an immersive experience that brings visitors into KAWS’s world. By bringing COMPANION beyond white-walled galleries and into public spaces, KAWS ensures that the widest range of people can contemplate, interact with, and enjoy his work. Smaller versions of COMPANION are also on view in this section, showcasing KAWS’s attention to execution, craftsmanship, and seriality through extreme variations in scale. 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.

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.” Access the 560,000 sqft Brooklyn Museum, which holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works 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).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. 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. 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: WHAT PARTY is curated by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.