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It is hard to overstate the reach of KAWS, an artist whose style and works have achieved the kind of pervasive global presence that puts him in league with Andy Warhol. Fully embracing the overlap of art and commerce, KAWS—the moniker of Brian Donnelly—has forged a style that collides cartoons and corporate mascots with a cheeky contemporary pathos, from his Mickey Mouse-esque Companions to the face-palming Astro Boy. Like other storied predecessors of Warhol’s milieu, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, KAWS first made his foray into art with graffiti, tagging around his native Jersey City beginning in high school. He would later move to New York, where he studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts. After graduating, he took work as a freelance animator and, at night, created “subvertising” by altering ads on billboards and at bus stops. According to Max Lakin, the artist reportedly cemented his visual style by the close of the 1990s, “trading in his lettered tag for a cartoon figure with X-ed out eyes and puffy crossbones plunged through its skull.”

What began as unsanctioned interventions of mass media and commodity culture evolved into full-blown, if winking, participation in these spheres—in 1999, KAWS worked with Japanese brand Bounty Hunter to create his first-ever vinyl toy. He would go on to create many more limited editions of these explosively popular and highly collectible sculptural figures, and worked with Medicom Toy to operate the brand and store OriginalFake in Tokyo from 2006 to 2013. Famously, in 2017, the Museum of Modern Art’s release of the KAWS Companion action figure led to unprecedented web traffic that crashed the museum’s web store. Endlessly blurring distinctions between high and low culture, KAWS has collaborated with a wide range of brands, including Burton, Vans, Supreme, Uniqlo, Dior, Kiehl’s, Nike, and Comme des Garçons.

In 2021, the Brooklyn Museum hosted the mid-career retrospective KAWS: WHAT PARTY. As the museum’s exhibition text put it, “KAWS’s practice acknowledges that works of art can occupy multiple realms—the aesthetic and the transcendent, the commodified and the priceless—and emphasizes that even within a cultural environment shaped by image and consumption, universal emotions such as love, friendship, loneliness, and alienation remain constant.”