KAWS: DOWN TIME at the High Museum of Art Atlanta

If there’s a word that best describes the work of KAWS (Brian Donnelly), it would be collaboration. Even from his early days as a graffiti artist in Jersey City, New Jersey, it never seemed as if his work on trains and billboards, and later bus and subway station advertising, was nihilistic or boastful. Rather, he appeared to be suggesting a collaboration with designers and architects. They just didn’t know it yet. It was a strategy—and some would say with graffiti, a risk—that paid off. Even recent work appropriating the characters from The Simpsons, The Smurfs, or SpongeBob Square Pants, in which they become The Kimpsons, Kurfs, and KAWSBOB, appear honest and reverential. As he told fellow artist Gary Panter in a 2009 interview, reprinted in KAWS: 1993–2010 (Rizzoli), “I think that anyone I make reference to can see that there’s a care put into what I do. I’m not trying to fool anybody. I’m not trying to make a fake copy.”
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