KAWS On Mao, Death, Monsters and His Nobu Tequila Collab

KAWS never planned to spend an early October weekend at Nobu Downtown. On Saturday, the artist Brian Donnelly—more widely known as KAWS—closed out the downstairs dining room with graffiti legend and friend Futura (Lenny McGurr) and his daughter, Tabatha Mcgurr, formerly of 2000s streetwear label, Married to the Mob, which made waves for its KAWS bikini collab back in the early days of Hypebeast.

“I said, are you kidding? I’m fucking going to be there tomorrow,” Donnelly recounted, “but my wife went to Connecticut with my daughter and her best friend for a sleepover, so I could go out—as long as they still came tonight.”

But the next night, Donnelly was back, holding court in a barroom banquette, dressed in all-black everything like a polished one-of-one edition of himself, to celebrate his collaboration with chef Nobu Matsuhisa on the occasion of the restaurant’s 30th anniversary. It was three decades ago when Robert De Niro won over the Japanese godfather of California cuisine and convinced him to grow his burgeoning Japanese-Peruvian empire from Beverly Hills to Tribeca.

Fifteen years ago, Nobu acquired his first KAWS piece, the wall-spanning acrylic abstract FLOATING THE RUMORS (2009), which the chef commissioned from the artist after spotting his work at Art Basel. The two formed a fast friendship, and because not flipping a work means something in this day and age—last year Matsuhisa asked his friend for a favor, to design a limited edition bottle for the chef’s latest collaboration with upstart QUI Tequila.

If KAWS’ past collaborations with Dos Equis beer and Hennessy cognac, more than a decade ago, were as accessible as his ubiquitous collaborations with Uniqlo, his animated Nobu logo on $800 bottles of the barrel-aged agave are on par with his runway work for Dior. (A deadstock KAWS tee shirt from Dior’s Spring/Summer 2019 menswear collection currently sells for $789 on the resale site StockX.)

Not everyone is so lucky to possess a real KAWS, however. Before sitting down with Donnelly, I spoke with QUI partners Medhat Ibraham and Mike Keriakos, who attended the party with his young son in tow. “Nobu had tears in his eyes when he looked at it,” Ibraham told me. The finished product was less of a dialogue between Donnelly and Matsuhisa than it was a gesture to the chef.

“No one felt like we could give Brian dramatic feedback without being offensive to the process,” Keriakos added. “You writers, those artists, don’t want the business folks getting in the way. Our business is how to figure out how to make the money from it.” Then he confessed: “We have a KAWS AstroBoy at home, I bought it on eBay; but there’s a chance it isn’t real. I got it for a quarter of the price.”

The Nobu collaboration wasn’t the only topic on Donnelly’s mind that night. We spoke on the eve of his summer show “KAWS: Time Off,” closing at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, where he showed alongside his wife, multidisciplinary artist Julia Chiang, and the opening of “The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection” at the Drawing Center in SoHo, which features 300+ drawings, illustrated notebooks and the odd Hilma af Klint watercolor, curated from the artist’s Brooklyn home and office.

This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken. About fifteen years ago, before I became an investigative reporter, I honed my craft hunting down a con man making counterfeit KAWS and Obey Giant prints in the basement of his Boston art gallery, defrauding collectors who traded editions through the gray market of message boards before an established resale and auction market for collectibles existed.

I could give you so many people to investigate—the hell of living with these counterfeiters. Somebody sent me this today, in case you haven’t seen it. [Donnelly pulls up the image of a counterfeit Four Foot Dissected Companion, originally produced by the Japanese toy maker Medicom.] This is from a place in California and we just learned about it. All we can do is take it off Instagram.

The way your work has disseminated into pop culture, there’s as much of an industry built around your brand collaborations as there is one built by your counterfeiters—you’re in a league of your own among the living, more on par with the estates of Warhol and Basquiat. Your show, “KAWS + Warhol,” is up now at the Warhol Museum, and you’re launching this tequila collab the same week the Basquiat estate is launching its collaboration with Dom Perignon. Have you begun planning your estate or thought about how your brand will exist beyond you?

With collecting, and making, I have spent so much time of my life getting stuff made, and you have a realization about what’s going to happen to it. And in my mind, I don’t want to dump it on my kids. I want to set it up so it’s comfortable for them to make decisions, so, yeah, I imagine there’d be a foundation. The truth is, and this part of it really sucks, if it’s not a foundation, if there are counterfeit dealers, imagine if there’s no one guarding it. When you’re younger, that thought does not exist.

You didn’t grow up around such an aggressive collectibles market.

Star Wars. But I always gravitated toward drawings and individual pieces instead of toys. I also have a surplus of friends who make stuff and send it to me. And that ends up in my kids’ rooms, my office… I live with my stuff.

Does it feel different being approached by a collector or friend who wants to collaborate with you versus some established brand, like MTV or General Mills, making a cold pitch?

I treat it the same as anyone. Honestly. It’s a different thing with Nobu. When he asked me, that’s like family. I said, I’m just going to do it for fun.

With collaborations like the Nobu bottle, you prefer to play with logos, and you leave your established characters out of it.

It doesn’t seem appropriate.

Do they ever speak to you?

[Laughing] Do they ever speak to me?

I’ve found a lot of the art that surrounds me at home, there are faces; they have personalities.

I feel very close to the drawings I make.

It would be hard to imagine something I made being trapped in a box on a shelf.

With the toys, it’s hard to keep track. With the paintings and sculptures…

You want them to breathe?

I like the fact you can walk past something.

Do you think it’s hard for someone who knows you to step up to ask to work with you?

I’ve known him since 2008 or 2009, and he’s never asked for anything. He’s always been generous with me; he’s a kind human being. He hosted my 40th birthday party here. So if he asks me to do something, I’m going to do it. I don’t do many friend things. [Pause.] Okay, I do. I do a lot of friend things.

You’re collaborating on a hotel with A Bathing Ape founder Nigo in Japan. And his label, Human Made, is producing a run of t-shirts for your show at the Drawing Center.

That’s a community thing.

But it’s not like Nigo’s assistant is calling you, it’s your friend Nigo approaching you.

It’s not—I don’t know. But take General Mills. They approached me out of the blue to collaborate on Reese’s cereal. I think it was my first or second meeting when I asked about the Monster cereals. I kept asking about the monsters—Count Chocula, Franken Berry—and they were like, Why do you keep asking about this? So they had something I wanted to do, and Reese’s was a cool thing, and I was excited to do it, and I like it as a collaboration, It’s so out of the box in terms of past things I’ve done, I think about things like that; if I do something like that, then I feel like that territory is covered.

And you treat your commercial collaborations with the same respect you do your fine art.

Of course, I put as much time into that stuff as I do anything. With Reese’s and the Monsters, I reverse-engineered the project, and I did a series of paintings, 100 percent hand-painted, not even telling General Mills, and then just showing them at the Warhol Museum.

Before the show, I ordered my cereal boxes from them, and they asked, Why did you order so much? I didn’t know why I did, but I knew there would be a reason why I ordered so much in the future. I knew there would be a use for the actual boxes in the future, and then it was one of those moments—I’m doing the Warhol Museum, and the boxes became my wallpaper. They will call back what Warhol did [with Brillo boxes], and it’s extremely present with my work. It made perfect sense. That was 100 percent me telling General Mills that I am doing this, and in my contract, I have the rights to do that kind of work.

You write your contracts so you have the rights to make fine art using your collaborators’ copyrights?

Yeah, it was part of our agreement. It was a win-win.

Do you know the artist Mark Drew? He paints old Peanuts comic strips and replaces the dialogue with ‘90s mixtape-era hip-hop lyrics. The paintings are even executed in the colors of the old Sony Sports Walkman. He’s always reticent to speak about his paintings for fear of the line he walks with the Schultz estate. When did it occur to you to start seeking permission for your fine art?

It was more like, if I want to make a toy, I get permission. If I’m going to make any produced product, I get permission. But if I’m making a one-off drawing, I won’t get permission, because what are they going to do, send me a cease-and-desist? If you look at the history of me doing this, if a brand takes the time to understand my work, I don’t think anyone would find it a problem.

In your early days you were breaking into bus stops and phone booths and then returning the advertisements painted over with your characters—your Calvin Klein posters were so iconic. When you started to break out, you produced two similar prints for the New Museum in 2000, and another, Gloves, in 2001, featuring a painted-over Kate Moss. It seemed like you transitioned out of the paintovers around that time. Five years ago, another work, a Simpsons-inspired paintover of Mao Zedong, surfaced for auction at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong before it was pulled.

I have no recollection of even doing that. And that was a painting. That was the most misguided moment of my life.

But the idea of painting Mao is an allusion to Warhol, who executed pop culture silkscreens and also made a fortune taking commissions and selling silkscreen portraits to famous friends, socialites and industry power players. Did you ever consider going that route back in the day?

It never crossed my mind. It doesn’t sound like a good idea.

So a trove of private paintover portraits isn’t going to turn up at auction one day?

I’ve only done one for a friend, and that was in an ad. Otherwise, I’ve just done some editorial work.

No photography for you.

I shot all that street stuff at that time; that was all medium format.

The trains and wall pieces in Jersey City, back in the ‘90s. You grew up in Jersey City, but you still haven’t brought any public works to the city. Ten years ago, the city unveiled a mural, The Jersey City Wave, over the Grove Street PATH station. But it was by Shepard Fairey, a South Carolina native.

I don’t do murals. Shepard does all these great murals.

Are you ever going to bring your floating Companion sculpture to the Hudson River?

Talk to Mayor Fulop about it.

Have you talked to Mayor Fulop about it?

He’s been very supportive, but the right project hasn’t come up.