Street Artist KAWS Gets Brooklyn Museum Exhibition

A new exhibit opening today at the Brooklyn Museum, KAWS: What Party, explores the twenty-five year career of Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly, more commonly known as KAWS. The exhibit features more than 100 works of art, from rarely seen graffiti drawings and notebooks to monumental sculptures. Along with works you may already be familiar with, there will are new items created specifically for this exhibit, the first major museum survey of KAWs’ work.

KAWS started out as a graffiti artist in New York City in the 1990s where he solidified his style. Early on, he created a signature character, the COMPANION. The skull-headed figure features heavily throughout all of KAWS’ work and appears in the exhibit in many forms, from colossal sculptures to smaller collectibles and paintings.

The Brooklyn Museum notes that KAWS’ work “both critiques and participates in consumer culture,” exploring the universal emotions “love, friendship, loneliness, and alienation.” This sentiment is illustrated in the wide range of works on display at the museum, from a selection of phone booth ads for DKNY and Calvin Klein that KAWS painted over, to depictions of familiar but slightly altered characters we reckognize from popular culture.

Thanks to technology from Acute Art, a digital art platform directed by acclaimed Swedish curator Daniel Birnbaum, visitors to the exhibit will get to interact with KAWs work in a whole new way. New augment reality works will allow visitors to use their smartphones to interact with the sculptures in a new augmented reality experience.

The exhibit opens today, February 26th, and will remain on view through September 5, 2021. You can purchase tickets online here. A limited number of same-day-timed tickets will be available for purchase on a first-come, first-served basis every day at the Museum, but the museum highly encourages visitors to book in advance online.

Next, check out Remnants of Old Penn Station are in the Brooklyn Museum