The first artwork that Brian Donnelly (*1974) remembers acquiring came in the form of a “black book.” As a young graffiti artist, first in Jersey City, then in New York proper, Donnelly, better known as KAWS, would pass his sketch pads around, going tag for tag with other artists. That some of his peers were to become legends of the 1990s street-art scene has meant the ephemera Donnelly accumulated formed a kind of archive – as well a formidable beginning to a practice of collecting. The Drawing Center’s presentation of that collection opens by paying homage to these origins: In vitrines near the entrance, black books flipped open reveal the internal workings of legends like FUTURA 2000, whose fluid, abstract compositions would be among the first of the medium to cross-pollinate with the worlds of fashion and fine art. Nearby, Subway Car Montage (1980–83), a delicate pencil and marker drawing by graffiti trailblazer Lee Quiñones, maps out one of his iconic subway-train-length paintings. Part acolyte, part ad hoc preservationist, KAWS appears here as a steward of the transient histories of the culture he claims as his lineage, despite having become the face of graffiti’s institutionalization and commercialization as an art form.
Christopher "DAZE" Ellis, Untitled (Black book), 1994, mixed media, 26.7 x 32.2 cm. Courtesy: Christopher "DAZE" Ellis and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo: Farzad Owrang
PART, Untitled (Black book), 1985, mixed media, 21.6 x 14.6 cm. Photo: Farzad Owrang
The first gallery transports viewers to KAWS’ Brooklyn studio, modeled as exact replicas of the same space from two periods. Except for the glass barrier, the staging is meant to be intimate, implying an artist living and working alongside his collection. On one side, a purple settee extends alongside a plethora of KAWS-designed objects: A chair reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s “Accumulation” series replaces her signature phallic protrusions with pink toy plushes, while a glass coffee table features Companion, one of KAWS’s signature X-eyed characters, lying prone as a base. The artist’s own cartoonish sensibility feels right at home alongside an otherworldly, anthropomorphic wooden sculpture by HC Westermann (Female Figure, 1977) and the skatedeck recycler Haroshi’s monster figurines (Telesdon, King Ghidorah, and Giant Dragiras, all 2018). As an artist whose own work is just as likely to be found in the Brooklyn Museum as in the living-room background of a Twitch streamer, the viewer is afforded a look into how Donnelly sees himself – not as a monolith, but as an artist forever in conversation with other artists, his art-making and collecting working as symbiotic practices.
Views of “The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection,” Drawing Center, New York, 2024
Photos: Jason Schmidt
If you are what you buy, Donnelly aligns himself with the outsider – the underground, the self-taught, and the anti-institutional. It’s an affinity unfolded with acumen on the crowded gallery wall behind the furniture, where the predating snakes of David Wojnarowicz’s Anatomy of Architecture and Desire (1988–89) get cozy with a shadowy architectural graphite from Anton van Dalen (Ave. A & E. 11 St #13, 1976), long a chronicler of the Lower East Side. Nearby, an ink and marker portrait by Jersey City-based artist Ana Benaroya (In A Whirlpool, I’m Loving You, 2021), whose female subjects take on the proportions of bodybuilders and superheroes, hangs mere feet from a dizzying pencil and pastel illustration by one of her influences, Peter Saul (Untitled (Mankind/Womankind), 1963). KAWS’ loyalties are also clear to artists like downtown painter Martin Wong (himself a collector of graffiti photography after his 1978 move to Manhattan) and Helen Rae, who didn’t have her first show until she was in her 70s; four dozen of her fractured, pop-Cubist pencil drawings feature here. Other standouts include an assemblage of comics by R. Crumb, whose American Splendor Assaults the Media (1983) details the paranoias and anxieties of an artist at the brink, and the hypnotizing drawings of Martín Ramírez, a self-taught Mexican-American whose caballeros, swathed in large geometric patterns, harmonize across the show with the zig-zagging lines of street maestros Eric Haze and PHASE 2.
Works by Helen Rae
Works by Anton van Dalen
Works by R. Crumb
Works by Martín Ramírez. Installation views, Drawing Center, New York, 2024. Photos: Jason Schmidt
From toys to skateboards, Uniqlo t-shirts to a Macy’s Day parade float, KAWS has become one of the most recognizable – and thus collectible – fine artists of our present. His works go down easy, gleefully riffing on and ripping off pop-culture icons like Mickey Mouse, Elmo, and the Michelin Man, his smooth, often monochrome figures rendered handy silhouettes for the projection of desire and identity. If they ultimately derive from a bootleg tradition and their artist’s origins as an NYC street writer, their cultural cachet renders them chameleonic: Contextualized not by any sense of place or narrative but a backdrop of accelerated commercialism, their references feel flattened, stripped of the humor, community, or commentary that one might expect of bootleg. With “The Way I See It,” KAWS seeks to fill in these blanks, to wrest the power of context back into his own hands.
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“The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection”
Drawing Center, New York
10 Oct 24 – 19 Jan 25