KAWS FAMILY exhibition at SFMOMA, San Francisco
- Delphine & Romain Class
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
When pop culture enters the museum.
In San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is presenting a large retrospective devoted to the American artist KAWS, titled KAWS: FAMILY, running until May 2026. This 1,000-square-meter exhibition marks an important milestone in the institutional recognition of a creator who is now internationally renowned: Brian Donnelly (KAWS), whose work oscillates between urban art, popular culture, and contemporary design.
Long perceived as a provocateur or a “commercial” artist, KAWS is now celebrated as a major figure of 21st-century pop art, capable of combining emotion, universality, and accessibility.
The exhibition brings together more than one hundred works — monumental sculptures, paintings, drawings, figurines, collaborations, and installations — tracing the journey of an artist and his emblematic characters, Companion, BFF, Chum, and Accomplice, who have transformed the symbols of mass culture into true icons of our time.
“KAWS blurs the boundaries between the museum and galleries, between art and merchandise, between the intimate and the collective.” — Ruth Berson, Deputy Director of SFMOMA.
Biography: From the Street to the Museum
Behind the pseudonym KAWS is Brian Donnelly, born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey. As a child, he was fascinated by cartoons and television advertising — colorful, codified worlds where everything appears cheerful, yet he already sensed a certain underlying sadness. In the 1990s, he began as a graffiti artist, marking the walls and billboards of New York with his “KAWS” tag and his earliest characters, recognizable by their rounded heads and “X”-shaped eyes.
After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1996, he started subverting advertising posters: he pasted his own figures onto them, blending consumer critique with poetic sensibility. These interventions, initially clandestine, drew the attention of the art world, and his characters gradually became universal symbols: COMPANION, BFF, CHUM, Accomplice…
Early on, KAWS understood that commercial objects could be a natural extension of art. In 1999, he collaborated with Medicom Toy in Japan to produce his first vinyl figure. The success was immediate. These limited editions — generally 500 pieces — allowed fans to enter his universe at a reasonable cost. From there, his world expanded: monumental sculptures, museum exhibitions, collaborations with Dior, Nike, Uniqlo, Supreme, and giant installations in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Doha.
“What interests me is not graffiti itself, but the way an image can circulate, be seen, owned, felt.” — KAWS, interview for Hypebeast, 2024.
A Landmark Exhibition: KAWS FAMILY
Presented at SFMOMA starting in November 2025, KAWS: FAMILY is the artist’s first major exhibition on the West Coast of the United States. It stages a dialogue between institutional art and popular culture, bringing together works from private and public collections around the world.
The exhibition is organized into several thematic sections:
the urban origins of KAWS, through his billboard interventions and early sketches;
his series of paintings with saturated color fields reminiscent of Lichtenstein and Warhol;
his monumental sculptures in wood, bronze, or aluminum featuring his world-famous characters — Companion, BFF, Chum;
and finally, the most emblematic section: FAMILY, a work that embodies his visual and emotional philosophy.
Outside the museum, a monumental inflatable installation of his COMPANION character — KAWS: HOLIDAY — floats above the terrace overlooking the bay, symbolizing an art that is both intimate and spectacular.
At the heart of the exhibition stands FAMILY (2021), a life-size bronze sculpture depicting several of KAWS’s characters — COMPANION, BFF, and CHUM — gathered in an intimate scene. Their posture — intertwined arms, tilted heads, restrained gestures — evokes tenderness, protection, and fragility. Behind their stylized faces lies a deep humanity: these wordless figures express the gentleness, fear, and dependence that KAWS sees at the core of every human relationship.
“Family is a tribute to the idea of belonging. Even when we feel different, we all need to feel surrounded.” — KAWS, remarks collected by SFMOMA.
The sculpture, produced on a large scale, was also released as vinyl figures in several colorways — black, pink/gray, blue — and sold in limited editions: Kaws Family Black, Kaws Family Grey, Kaws Family Brown. This duality between monumental artwork and miniature object illustrates KAWS’s ambition: to make art accessible to everyone, with no hierarchy between the gallery and the home.
“KAWS Gone” (2019) — Melancholy in Motion
Created in 2019, Gone is another iconic sculpture by the artist, depicting COMPANION carrying BFF in his arms, lifeless, like a contemporary religious figure — a pop Pietà. Here, the artist reinterprets tenderness by associating it with loss. COMPANION, a symbol of resilience, becomes the guardian of a memory, a vanished friendship, or a lost love. This moving work, both gentle and tragic, was released as vinyl KAWS Gone figures starting in 2020, becoming one of the most sought-after items for collectors.
In Gone, popular culture ceases to be lighthearted: it becomes metaphysical. KAWS’s figures do not laugh, speak, or play; they bear the weight of a silent humanity, that of a world saturated with images yet hungry for genuine emotion.
“Gone transforms the toy into an icon. Behind the smooth surface of the vinyl lies profound sadness, an elegy of modernity.” — Artforum, critic, 2025
“KAWS Take” (2020) — The Ambiguity of Connection
With Take (2020), KAWS continues his exploration of human relationships. The sculpture depicts COMPANION alongside a small, childlike figure, appearing to either hold or restrain its hand. This ambiguous gesture, caught between protection and possession, evokes the complexity of authority, guidance, and attachment. The work has been presented in polychrome resin as well as vinyl figures in various colorways.
Once again, KAWS plays with the tension between tenderness and unease. The viewer is invited to question: is COMPANION protecting the child, or holding it back? This ambivalence lies at the heart of KAWS’s emotional power: he shows without judging, he moves without imposing.
The KAWS Language: Between Critique and Tenderness
KAWS’s aesthetic continues the legacy of Warhol and Lichtenstein’s pop art, but it transcends it through its emotional dimension. Where Warhol captured consumer society in an ironic mirror, KAWS injects human warmth. His characters — hybrids between mascots and existential figures — embody both modern solitude and the universal need for connection.
By deliberately blurring the line between art and product, KAWS questions the status of the artwork in the age of visual capitalism. His commercial collaborations are not betrayals but extensions of his practice: a way to integrate art into everyday life through objects that can be handled, collected, and experienced.
“KAWS’s art is a form of industrial tenderness. It speaks to the screen generation through the language of toys, yet retains the depth of classical sculpture.” — Le Monde, 2025
Conclusion: A Universal Art
Through KAWS FAMILY, KAWS GONE, and KAWS TAKE, KAWS offers a contemporary meditation on love, loss, and belonging. His universe, simultaneously gentle and melancholic, colorful and grave, transcends pop art to become a visual poetry of human connection.
At SFMOMA, his work stands as a bridge between generations, between artistic elitism and popular culture, between monumentality and intimacy. Far from being a mere exhibition, KAWS: FAMILY is an emotional experience: it reflects our own humanity, our childhood, and the essential need to belong to a family, real or imagined.
“When I look at my characters, I see emotions I cannot always express. They are my silent alter egos.” — KAWS
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