25-03-2025
Artist KAWS Opens At Arkansas's Crystal Bridges Museum Of American Art
The KAWS figures in FAMILY (2021) are the anchor to the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art exhibit of his work.
It's a wonderful thing these days that we can find fine art in the most unexpected of places. Head down a trail along a wooded ravine at the edge of Bentonville, Arkansas and suddenly up pops the celebrated Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (CB). Then take the artist KAWS whom you couldn't miss if you tried for his larger-than-life pop characters that are beloved by worldwide audiences and serious collectors alike. Put them together and you now have the captivating exhibit KAWS: FAMILY that just opened at Crystal Bridges.
Even if you don't know the names of KAWS's signature characters—COMPANION being the most ubiquitous one cast into huge statues down to small figurines—they will ring a bell for their prominent X'd-out eyes. The show's titular piece FAMILY (2021) depicts four bronze figures with a black patina who are standing in the classic family vacation photo pose; two COMPANION figures on left are presumably mother and daughter holding a doll, and to the right, the KAWS character BFF is dad with a hand on a kid's shoulder, the latter appearing in the guise of his Michelin Man-esque CHUM character.
KAWS has produced his MTV MOONMAN figure in various media and sizes, as here in the stainless steel SPACE (2021).
While X'd-out eyes in classic cartoons typically denoted a concussed, drunk or dead character, KAWS manages with just an elegant tapering of the lines that form his Xs to keep his faces from tipping into anything ghoulish. BFF in particular has a cuddly Sesame Street-ish persona. And that, even if in the painted bronze piece GONE (2021), COMPANION is carrying a pink, passed out BFF. Or, so too in the glossy painted vinyl figure TIME OFF (2023) that depicts BFF lying down vaguely louche. Furry as ever, BFF is always still cuddly.
Even in the KAWS series that plays on the Simpsons, the family we know so well in the acrylic on canvas UNTITLED (KIMPSONS #2) (2024) appears innocuous while holding their X'd eye decapitated heads. Ditto, Snoopy is still Snoopy with Xs in the acrylic on paper series MAN'S BEST FRIEND (2014) that takes up an entire wall.
Anyone who knows KAWS's oversized figures well, may be new to his equally vital drawing and painting skills. You see it not only in that Snoopy series, but in such works as in a small ink on paper work for the Italian bicycle company Cinelli in which KAWS turns a mere letter C into a whimsical human-ish figure with his signature X for eyes.
And then all the granular touch to all the puffs in bowls of Reese's Puffs cereal boxes turns out on close inspection to be hand painted. An entire wall is also lined with his General Mills Monster cereals mounted behind clear plastic box holders.
The towering wooden sculpture AT THIS TIME (2013) in the COMPANION character series stands outside the main KAWS exhibit.
If the Brooklyn-based artist has been known for some three decades for huge figures in solid bronze, aluminum, fiberglass or fine-grained dark wooden sculpture, he's worked within a continuum that also goes from small vinyl and plush toys up to huge, light inflatable pieces.
Then there are the sneakers, skateboards and street culture that keep him busy, and high-end advertising, fashion, and product design work. KAWS has worked with Uniqlo, Nike, Comme des Garcons, and he's made plush toy-adorned furniture with the Brazilian Campana design brothers, a sofa of which appears in the KAWS: FAMILY show.
For the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), KAWS refashioned the MTV Moonman in the form of his COMPANION character. Talk about bling: the necklace version he made for Kid Cudi, Space (2021), is drenched in diamonds and it sparkles when you wave your phone flashlight over it into the glass case that holds it here.
SEPARATED (2021) is a painted bronze version of the COMPANION character.
The KAWS: FAMILY curator at Crystal Bridges, Alejo Benedetti, made the wise decision to create a series of smaller rooms rather than large gallery spaces, which allows for a free flow through disparate KAWS themes and media. It's like a visual palate cleanser going room to room.
The CB show is an expanded version of the original mounted at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) whose Deputy Director & Chief Curator Julian Cox worked closely with KAWS himself for that show.
In his lead essay 'KAWS: Shapeshifter' in the show's handsome catalog (DelMonico Books), Cox calls KAWS a 'highly adept crossover artist.' For the New Jersey-native whose formal training was at New York's School of Visual Arts, the KAWS nom d'artist was highly taggable right from his early graffiti artist days.
Often KAWS figures look kind of, sort of, familiar, and indeed he's long been melding icons that have swirled in the Zeitgeist for the last century. You can't always place the influence—and no matter. With his pop art sensibility, it's no surprise that KAWS sites Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Claes Odenburg, among others, as inspiration. His work might even remind anyone of a certain age of having grown up reading MAD Magazine.
And then you come to the painted bronze SEPARATED (2021) that was inspired by a photo KAWS saw of a girl sitting with her head in her hands after having been separated at the border from her family. It's his character COMPANION represented in a new light, a political one perhaps or most deeply human for certain. It's poignant pop art, if you will.
Crystal Bridges general museum admission is free, while the KAWS: FAMILY exhibit is $15 (through July 28, 2025).
In other Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art news, renowned architect Moshe Safdie has returned for an expansion of his original museum that will add 50% more gallery space. Set to be completed next year, the new wing will help fulfill founder Alice Walton's vision of giving the community and visitors 'radical accessibility' to art. More on that later to come.
