KAWS: the former graffiti artist turned global pop art star shows off his collector’s eye

Most who hear the name KAWS immediately think of his signature cartoony characters with Xs instead of eyes, which have appeared in fashion ads and on T-shirts, as outsized inflatable sculptures and as a hugely popular line of collectable toys. The name is based on the graffiti tag used in the 1990s by the artist Brian Donnelly, who started spray painting as a teenager on the streets of New Jersey and, after graduating with a degree in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York, worked for a time in an animation studio. Over the past decade, KAWS has become internationally famous, and his work has been compared to Andy Warhol’s for the way it blurs the lines around pop culture and art, commercialism and conceptualism.

In fact, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is currently hosting a joint exhibition that explores the darker themes of violence and death found in the work of both KAWS and Warhol. And a blockbuster show of the artist’s family of characters is travelling from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which organised it, to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville next year. Meanwhile, his New York dealer Skarstedt opened a new gallery in Chelsea in November with an exhibition of KAWS paintings.

But Donnelly is not just a very busy artist, he is also a collector, and a selection of his extensive holdings are now on view at the Drawing Center in New York. The display of 350 works is just a fraction of around 4,000 works, by more than 500 artists, that Donnelly owns—and “that’s definitely a modest calculation”, he says. The show includes pieces by Modern and contemporary artists such as Ed Ruscha, Lee Lozano, Willem de Kooning, Raymond Pettibon and Gladys Nilsson, shown alongside street artists like Lee Quiñones, Futura 2000 and Rammellzee, as well as self-taught practitioners such as Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger, Helen Rae and Susan Te Kahurangi King.

We spoke with the artist about his collecting interests, and what connects the artists he gravitates towards.

The Art Newspaper: In your Drawing Center show, there is a wall in the downstairs gallery composed entirely of cat portraits. It is cute and funny but also a great example of the threads you pull together across the exhibition, drawing connections between different artists, in this case the Victorian-era illustrator Louis Wain and the contemporary artist Simone Johnson.

Brian Donnelly/KAWS: I was thinking, is that a bit much? But I cannot resist. I wish I could have transitioned Louis Wain into some of the Chicago Imagists, but I don’t have any of his later works. It’s really hard to get those pieces.

The show has many similar surprising revelations, with work by Ed Ruscha next to Henry Darger and H.C. Westermann next to Willem de Kooning. Your collecting is really wide ranging—how did it get that way?

I hope to stumble upon an image open-mindedly, and get into artists without sort of thinking about: “Oh, is this a graffiti artist? Is this a self-taught artist? Is this bona fide, A-list, whatever-you-call-it contemporary?” That was one of the really fun parts about doing the show: having Ed Ruscha focusing on the letters of his name next to PHASE 2 and Lee Quiñones and other guys who, for almost their complete careers, did letter- or name-focused works.

And why is one considered an artist, whose work you see in MoMA, while the other, whose work is on the street, is not?

Hopefully that all changes. I know a lot of the work in the Drawing Center won’t be familiar to some people, but to others, these are artists they’ve idolised for the last 40 or 50 years. You think of someone like Lee Quiñones [spray painting] these giant train cars in his teens, top to bottom, end to end, in bad lighting, under duress, and those iconic [graffiti] images that photographers like Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper documented so well. That has really influenced a global audience of young people, and those people are now of age and making work. They might not be facing forward with their influences, but it’s in there, it’s in their DNA. Having 50 years of that kind of work being in the world, it’s kind of unavoidable. I think people have to come to terms with how influential it was. It’s great to see that next to work by other artists, like Ana Benaroya, who’s young, and to see her focus on drawings with markers and ink. There’s a language there, but they aren’t aware of each other.

Were you very involved in the installation of the show at the Drawing Center?

The two central walls recreate [my] studio. The rest of the hang was my hang, and it is all really personal work to me. I have these weird connections in my head that might not necessarily translate, but in my mind, there’s a reason why this person is next to this person. And I just like hanging shows. I get to indulge my inner OCD.

When you start collecting an artist’s work, I know you dive into their biography and find out about the other artists in their circle, and the other people who influenced them. Is that where the connections you make between artists start?

It’s from all sorts of places, honestly, but yes, just being around the work, you want to learn about it, what influenced [the artist], and that always leads to other artists. And I think that’s a great way to explore and navigate all these different bubbles that exist.

The show also includes many artists’ sketchbooks. Is that a big part of your collection?

Not deliberately, but they’re all from artists that I’ve already collected. I just think that’s such an amazing, intimate piece of information. Like that R. Crumb sketchbook, it’s open to a spread, but every page is incredible. That’s such a treasure.

I wanted to include that stuff to show, even with an artist like Dondi, how the repetitive focus on letter form and those things have worked out. I put it next to Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who is known for his paintings but did these really intricate pen drawings. And they have these same geometrical structures
you get when you sort of let go of the lettering, and just get into the composition. At a certain point, you just kind of drift into another realm of image making. It’s really incredible to see that sort of development.

How do you, practically, store these kinds of objects?

I treat everything the way I treat the work I make, basically. I have all those structures set up just for my practice. If it’s something I own, I feel as much a custodian as I do with my own work.

It seems like you have a whole museum put together. Do you think you would eventually donate it to an institution, or would you want to open a museum?

Honestly, I don’t collect with the intention to show. So normally it just sits in the studio in my house and I get to have these sorts of observations in private. There’s always work out in the world on loan. But the idea of having a museum, that’s a bit overwhelming. I kind of want to make my own work.

Do you think you’ll do more shows like this?

I don’t think I’m going to rush to do something again, it’s sort of an undertaking, putting a show like that together. I’ve been working on it for about two years. And I’m happy it was at the Drawing Center, because at least it gave me some restrictions to focus on works on paper—even though I snuck design and sculptural things into those studio scenarios. It at least gave me some parameters, because it would have been just too open-ended. But I do hope people walk away from the show knowing that there’s a million entry points.

So you have enough works to do a show of painting, for example, or design?

Oh, easily. But who knows? If there’s an opportunity to do so… Honestly, that’s how I am, even when I do my own shows. I get the work done, I hang the show, and then I immediately think about what I need to do next. If there was an opportunity to do a great painting show, or a sculpture show, it’s one thing. If there’s a will, then I could figure it out.

What has it been like for you, going from being known as a street artist to being an internationally famous contemporary artist?

I haven’t done anything on the street in over 25 years, and when I did stuff on the street, I didn’t consider myself a street artist. When I do stuff in a gallery, I don’t consider myself a contemporary artist. Hopefully people are at the point where they can let go of these sorts of labels.

Biography

Born: 1974 Jersey City

Lives and works: New York

Education: 1996 BFA, Illustration, School of Visual Arts, New York

Key Shows: 2024 Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh 2023 Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 2022 Serpentine Gallery, London 2021 Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo; Brooklyn Museum, New York 2019 Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; HOCA Foundation, Hong Kong 2016 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield 2013 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Represented by: Skarstedt Gallery,
New York and London

• The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center, New York, until 19 January 2025

• KAWS + Warhol, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, until 20 January 2025

• KAWS: Day By Day, Skarstedt, New York, until 21 December

• KAWS: Family, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, 15 March 2025-28 July 2025