Drawing Papers 157
Hilma af Klint
Nicole Appel
Ana Benaroya
Chaz Bojórquez
Julia Chiang
Joe Coleman
George Condo CRASH
R. Crumb
Julie Curtiss
Henry Darger
Larissa De Jesús Negrón
Willem de Kooning
Jane Dickson DONDI
Martha Edelheit
Nicole Eisenman
FUTURA 2000
Tomoo Gokita
Mark Gonzales
Rick Griffin
William A. Hall
Eric Haze
Todd James
Simone Johnson
Mike Kelley
Susan Te Kahurangi King
Aline Kominsky-Crumb
Josef Kotzian
Matt Leines
Judith
Anton
H.C.
Karl Wirsum
Laura Hoptman
Over the past half century, The Drawing Center has periodically created exhibitions that highlight notable institutional drawing collections located far from our New York City home and private collections that by definition are inaccessible to a general public. In 1999, the artist and connoisseur Jack Shear curated an exhibition of highlights from the collections of half a dozen well-known artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, and Jasper Johns. In 2022, our institution featured works from Shear’s own collection of more than a thousand works on paper, hung in three different iterations over the course of the exhibition’s run.
The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection is in the tradition of these earlier exhibitions but with a crucial difference: taken together, the works on paper that Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) has collected over the past two and a half decades argue for a more expansive field of contemporary art that includes work by self-taught and neurodivergent artists, comic book creators and graffiti writers, illustrators, and visionaries who use pencil and paper to share their revelations. Though also shot through with drawings by some of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century—Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso come immediately to mind—the exhibition offers an expanded definition of artistic genius proven exclusively through the medium of drawing.
We have artist and collector Brian Donnelly to thank for all of this: the exquisite artwork; the playful yet absorbing installation; the vision that drove him to amass more than four thousand works of art in the space of a little more than twenty years. Brian’s work as a graffiti writer and a maker of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and multiples has been directed towards a broad audience, and the subsequent popularity of almost everything he creates has made him
one of the best known artists on the planet. The impulse to share the work he has collected seems to come from a similarly populist point of view. As much a share as a show, The Way I See It is an opportunity for everyone to enjoy the work of artists rarely seen on the walls of most museums. Experiencing original drawings of images we are used to seeing in comic books or on gum wrappers, on the side of a building or on a moving subway train inside a museum reminds us that great drawing is part of the world and is all around us.
All of us at The Drawing Center thank Brian for working so hard and so generously on this display of his most beloved possessions. We love him for sharing these life-changing artworks with our public. Thank yous must be given also to his hard-working colleagues at the KAWS studio, first and foremost to Gen Watanabe for his excellent stewardship of this complicated project. We are also grateful to David Arkin, Mark Barrow, Michelle Bonomo, and Matt Leines, all of whom worked hard on the studio end to facilitate the exhibition and the publication. The eminent graphic designer and principal at 2x4, Michael Rock, contributed a wonderful design for the show’s identity and Human Made worked with Brian to create an exclusive flight of T-shirts for our shop. We are thrilled to work with both firms and grateful for their contributions.
The Drawing Center is enormously grateful to the exhibition’s lead funders for this exhibition, Neuberger Berman Private Wealth, the Outsider Art Fair, and Skarstedt, New York. All three organizations do so much for the contemporary art community, often putting their muscle behind artistic voices that deserve more exposure. UNIQLO and Christie’s Art Finance have also taken a leading role in making this exhibition a reality, and they too have been consistent supporters of the most contemporary art.
At The Drawing Center, there are many colleagues to thank for making this exhibition a reality. Rebecca DiGiovanna, Isabella Kapur, and Ariadne Diogenous worked tirelessly on both the exhibition and the publication. Our Registrar Sarah Fogel; Deputy Director Olga Valle Tetkowski; and Operations Manager Aaron Zimmerman gathered hundreds of artworks and created a beautiful environment for them. Valerie Newton and Anna Oliver worked with the KAWS studio to create Drawing Center-exclusive products for our beautiful little store; Allison Underwood and Isabel Riquezes have promoted the show with wit and panache. Aimee Good has created wonderful public programs to accompany the presentation, and Rebecca Brickman and Tiffany Shi in our Development Department raised funds for all of it.
The show is accompanied by this outstanding volume that contains contributions by Valérie Rousseau, Senior Curator & Curatorial Chair for Exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, and writer Nicole Rudnick. Designed by Peter Ahlberg and edited by Joanna Ahlberg, it joins a growing canon of Drawing Center books featuring great works of art by artists whose work rarely receives mainstream attention. Our thanks to the contributors and to Joanna and Peter, who have created another outstanding TDC publication. It has been an enormous pleasure to work with Brian on a show that we have been dreaming about for almost three years. With so many great works on paper by so many artists whose work will be introduced to an art-going public for the first time, The Way I See It is an exhibition that encapsulates The Drawing Center’s mission: to surprise, delight, and inspire our audience with wonderful drawings from a wide variety of places, periods, cultures, and traditions. Thanks to all who have made this show possible, and welcome to all who will visit the show or open the book. Prepare to be dazzled.
Nicole Rudick
In the poem “Ekphrastic,”1 Rebecca Wolff writes about going to an art exhibition. “There are some things up there / uptown / I want to see,” she begins. Further in the poem she writes, “I’m going to see / what I look. What I look at, when I look, vessel, / I stood to see.”
The vessel is both the work itself—its ideas and meaning—and herself, a container for the art, which she holds by way of observation and rumination. Throughout the poem, she draws a subtle difference between looking and seeing; the former is an act, the latter is a process. “I went to stand to look / to see,” she continues. “Venturing further I went outside myself to look / at that wall. It fed!”
Wolff’s poem attempts in part the difficult task of describing what we get from looking at and seeing art—also the subject of
The Drawing Center’s exhibition The Way I See It. The show’s title references the source of the art on view: KAWS’s personal collection, which includes more than four thousand works of art by some seven hundred artists as well as expansive groupings, such as the archive of the graffiti artist DONDI. The collection has been shaped by KAWS’s interests and tastes as both a viewer and a practitioner. The title echoes Wolff’s lines, signaling the very individual experience of looking at art, and acts as a public declaration—not only “here is what I see” but also “this is the way I see it.” The title can be read as an unvoiced question to the viewer, too: How do you see it?
The first artwork KAWS bought was a pen-and-ink drawing of a housefly by Raymond Pettibon, in November 2000 [FIG. 1]. He saw it at On View, an early platform for selling art online, and purchased it offline from Zwirner gallery, a partner on the site. Pettibon frequently combines language and imagery, and above the fly, he
1 Rebecca Wolff, “Ekphrastic,” One Morning— (Seattle: Wave Books, 2015).
wrote the word “SWAK,” onomatopoeia for the sound of a flyswatter hitting its target. It also spells “KAWS” backward, a fact not lost on the younger artist, who began using the tag while in high school in Jersey City in the early 1990s. The graphic quality of Pettibon’s art and the incorporation of writing as a form of drawing must also have appealed to KAWS, a graffiti artist whose work from around 2000 includes subverted bus posters, elaborate tags, and figures delineated in white on a black background, a kind of obverse of Pettibon’s signature style.
But KAWS’s collection didn’t begin with Pettibon. He was steeped in graffiti culture and had been trading work and black books with other graffiti writers for several years. Since then, he has collected the art of his street-writing predecessors from the 1970s and ’80s because, he says, “I grew up frustrated that I didn’t see it in any institution.” Today, he’s in a position to advocate for the work and preserve it, and graffiti art and related ephemera constitute a sizable portion of his collection. His interest in “peers and heroes,”2 as he once put it, continues to shape his collecting habits. But for KAWS, as for many people, the bug for collecting goes back even further. When I visited his studio, he showed me a photograph of what he jokingly refers to as his first collection: a group of stuffed animals huddled in his childhood home [FIG. 2]. Among them is a plush Big Bird, whose bulging eyes are two hard pink orbs that resemble the round protruding eyes of BFF, a character who appears in KAWS’s work.
Representational work makes up the bulk of his collection and reflects the art and artists that have pulled him in, as he says, over the past three decades. Though he’s hesitant to call it an obsession,
collecting art is the activity KAWS regularly returns to, and the accumulation of so many works in about a twenty-five-year span suggests a certain fervor, if not compulsion. In a more conventional collecting practice, the works might be acquired and organized according to a system or principle. But KAWS’s collection exceeds any framework: the minority of work that isn’t in storage is arrayed salon-style in his studio on every available surface—walls, tables, and floor—in no particular order. (Work also hangs in his Brooklyn apartment and his house outside of the city.) In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that “the original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impress of its occupant.”3 The artist Janet Fish, talking about her own collecting habits in 1994, similarly described it as a snail building a shell for itself. “You keep encrusting,” she said.4
The process of gathering desired objects to oneself is less analytical than intuitive. So, too, with KAWS, who buys work that appeals to him for reasons he can’t quite enunciate. He collects art that he feels “has a kind of reasoning, or I want to have it around. There’s a comfort there.”5 Peter Saul is well represented in the
2 “KAWS in Conversation with Sam Shikiar,” The 92nd Street Y, New York, December 5, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_HInEwQJ2E.
3 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 220.
4 Janet Fish, quoted in “Consummate Consumption: Jeffrey Slonim on Artists’ Collections,” Artforum, December 1994, 8.
5 KAWS, unpublished interview with the author, June 14, 2024.
collection (more than sixty paintings and drawings, dating from around 1957 to 2017), and that expansive range allows KAWS to observe up close the progression of Saul’s work over decades, the “different mark-making world that he went through,”6 KAWS says. He also owns a slew of drawings by Helen Rae (the largest wall in The Drawing Center’s show is devoted to forty-eight of Rae’s works) and by Susan Te Kahurangi King (sixteen are on view) and a concentration of work by the Chicago Imagists best known as the Hairy Who. But in the context of a collection, and apart from an individual artist’s body of work, each piece becomes representative of something different. The collection becomes a system unto itself, with its own history, character, and logic—a gathering of imagery, forms, and color that produces vibrations and creates new meaning.
The salon-hanging in the sitting area of KAWS’s studio (reproduced in two versions in The Drawing Center’s exhibition) is an example of the way the collection constitutes a unique body of work. A cluster above and to the right of Ettore Sottsass’s Canada Settee (1959) includes R. Crumb’s Dragster (1966) [PL. 211], H.C. Westermann’s Central America (1973) [PL. 196] Lee Quiñones’s Heart Break (1978) [PL. 96], David Wojnarowicz’s Anatomy and Architecture of Desire (1988–89) [PL. 179], Joe Coleman’s The Holy Saint Adolf II [Adolf Wölfli] (1995) [PL. 160], and Ana Benaroya’s In A Whirlpool, I’m Loving You (2021) [PL. 177]. If not for the irrational juxtaposition, we might never think of these works in relation to one other. All are figurative and, with the exception of Coleman’s painting, all are drawings, but otherwise they appear to have little in common—for instance, de Kooning’s expressively drawn golem-like figure [PL. 181], rendered in charcoal, versus Benaroya’s colorful double portrait of confident women whose awareness and attention is as much on themselves as on the viewer.
Yet even with few immediate correspondences, there is a rhythm in the dissonance, a disorganization in which new organizing principles arise. An arcing rainbow in Westermann’s drawing rhymes with Wojnarowicz’s green and blue globe and the yellow and red cars, boats, and trains that spin round it. Benaroya’s textural and volumetric inked lines and mottled colors find complement in Crumb’s versatile, endlessly descriptive pen. Coleman encircles his vigorous depiction of the artist Adolf Wölfli with a thick red contour, which echoes the red cowl that envelopes Quiñones’s skeleton
reaper; in both works, the figures are wreathed by images and forms that illuminate their identities. For KAWS, such improvisatory relationships can be surprising and productive:
It’s so informative … to be able to look at [Martín] Ramírez and look at Jim Nutt and wonder if there are correspondences between them somehow. Or the things you know don’t have a direct connection, like Tadanori Yokoo’s ’60s paintings and Karl Wirsum’s ’60s paintings, and knowing there’s no internet. I’m assuming that Yokoo wasn’t aware of Wirsum and Wirsum wasn’t aware of Yokoo, but when I look at the pink-girl paintings [they were both doing], I think they should have been in a show together … What was in the air in ’62 that made different people in such different settings go to this place? It’s fun to start to understand through the years what other stories you didn’t grow up aware of because you didn’t see them in print.7
KAWS has said that his collection functions as a personal reference library—a way to study the progression of an artist’s style, to think abstractly about the marks of a drawing, or to remind himself that there’s more than one way of making art. Nutt’s Really!? (Thump thump) (1986) [PL. 167] hangs behind Sottsass’s settee, partially obscured. KAWS takes it off the wall so that we can examine it more closely and observes the gentle gradation of Nutt’s lines and the way the light sits on the paper. “You could never enjoy a book reproduction like this,” he says. He mentions staring absently at the two Helen Rae drawings that hang near his studio’s kitchen every time he makes tea and absorbing, again and again, their dynamic planes of saturated color. Living with other artists’ work is “energy, food,”8 he says (recalling Wolff’s line “It fed!”).
Wojnarowicz said that in Anatomy and Architecture of Desire he hoped to “compress simultaneous experiences in terms of distance and location.”9 Something similar happens in the small universe of KAWS’s collection, a grouping of individual works that condense art-historical space and time and, in the collective state, become parts of a larger whole. The Drawing Center’s exhibition allows for a consideration of Picasso’s Tête d’Arlequin Masqué (Head of a Harlequin in a Mask) (1971) [PL. 162] and an untitled drawing by CRASH (1983)
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
9 “Anatomy and Architecture of Desire, 1988–1989,” Art Basel website, https:// www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/59429/David-Wojnarowicz-Anatomy-andArchitecture-of-Desire?lang=en.
[PL. 155]—two portraits whose subjects share a quizzical expression. It also places DONDI’s 1985 watercolor and ink drawing of his own name written in stylized letterforms [PL. 134] next to an Ed Ruscha pencil drawing from 1963 of his surname rendered in yellow bubble letters [PL. 108]. Ruscha’s drawing predates DONDI’s by two decades but relates to it visually as though the two are contemporaries. And in KAWS’s collection, they can be. •
Collections belonging to artists can be extensions of their own work. Joe Coleman, whose portraits of transgressive and notorious individuals are jam-packed with detail exactingly rendered using a single-hair brush, collects objects and artifacts related to infamous historical events and people—such as sideshow curiosities, outlaws, and murderers—and displays them in an overstuffed private museum called the Odditorium. “The collection is so much a part of my work,” he told Dazed magazine, “that it can also reflect the way I work. The overall experience of the room is like my paintings—you look at a painting from a distance, but then if you get close to any of the details, each one has a whole story behind it.”10 (One of Coleman’s paintings in The Drawing Center show depicts Henry Darger [PL. 159], whose work is also on view and who not only maintained an archive of printed material in his home/studio but also collected hundreds of found objects that he displayed alongside his art.)
With KAWS, the relationship is less direct. In thinking of his collection as a library, he makes it a repository of thought and a place of study. Because he lives with the work, occasionally rotating pieces or lending them out, every moment can be an occasion for study— when making tea, when stuck on a project, or when in the throes of creation. For Benjamin, study has a basis in idleness, an experience that has “no sequence and no system … a product of chance.”11 When we are stuck on a problem, we are advised to go for a walk or to turn toward other matters, and by leaving the problem behind, a solution often makes itself known. (To be led by the senses rather than reason, like Baudelaire’s flâneur, is to arrive at an unplanned destination.) Looking at art or reading a book or watching a play
10 Joe Coleman, quoted in Rod Stanley, “Inside the Odditorium of Joe Coleman,” Dazed, March 31, 2009, https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/ article/2817/1/inside-the-odditorium-of-joe-coleman. 11 Benjamin, 801.
offers another method of getting outside of one’s head. We enter into the work and allow ourselves to be temporarily possessed by it and to come back to ourselves changed. Study is akin to the act of seeing in Wolff’s poem—an ongoing process and thus always incomplete (rather like the act of collecting).
Robert Motherwell believed that “through pictures, our passions touch.”12 He doesn’t specify whose passions are shared, but one iteration could involve the artist and the viewer brought together through the former’s creation of an image. Motherwell felt that if a work of art could not connect with its audience, “it is nothing.” But the viewer also bears responsibility: they must make their feelings and thoughts available to the painting, the novel, the performance. Engagement is a two-way street; art needs conversation and a complex of opinions for its development. “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints,” Henry James argues in “The Art of Fiction.”13 By spending time with art—by thinking and talking about it—we participate in its enrichment, and in the process, we grow our culture, the environment in which each of us lives and breathes.
The artist Félix González-Torres collected around fifteen hundred midcentury plastic and rubber toys, which he placed around his apartment—on shelves, on the fireplace mantle, and in the hearth in groupings that resemble the dense arrays of his “candy works” or the images of crowds that frequently appear in his work derived from newspaper and magazine clippings [FIG. 3].
Of these toys, he once said, “People ask me, ‘Are you ever going to
12 Robert Motherwell, quoted in Ellen H. Johnson, ed., American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 28.
13 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884).
4 Installation view of A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita, Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane, New Orleans, September 9, 2015–January 3, 2016
5 KAWS, FAMILY, 2021
19 18 do something with them?’ I already do—I live with them.”14 In 2015, KAWS was invited to mount a solo show at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University but opted to change the exhibition’s focus to a group encounter showing his own work alongside pieces from his collection by Wirsum and Tomoo Gokita [FIG. 4]. He was friendly with both artists and thought that putting all of their work in a space for conversation would be more instructive and exciting—a realization, in a sense, of his imagined pairing of Wirsum and Yokoo.
In The Way I See It, two of KAWS’s works mix with the collection: a chair, made in collaboration with Estudio Campana, constructed with KAWS’s pink BFF plushies, and a table featuring a supine COMPANION, another recurring character, supporting a plate of glass. His studio setup and his collection as a whole reproduce this idea on a larger scale. In collecting work, he has created a community of similarly minded friends, a group with whom he can spend time, hash out problems, and appreciate the variety of mark making and creativity. Camaraderie is a defining element of his own art in the characters who star in many of his pieces. In 2021, he created a large bronze sculpture called FAMILY [FIG. 5], in which five figures representing three of these characters (COMPANION, CHUM, BFF) pose together as if in a formal family portrait.
Lawrence Weiner encapsulated the spirit of collecting in a text-based work from 1980: MANY THINGS PLACED HERE + THERE TO FORM A PLACE CAPABLE OF SHELTERING MANY OTHER THINGS PUT HERE + THERE. 15 Art is a realm of thought and exchange,
14 Félix González-Torres, quoted in “Consummate Consumption,” 7. 15 Weiner’s work is itself part of a legendary collection amassed by Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.
and collecting (as well as looking and seeing) can be a method of belonging, of finding one’s people and finding connection in common cause. Hung in his studio and homes, KAWS’s collection is a way to bring other realms of thought and creativity to bear on daily life; exhibiting the work brings the same experience into the social space. “I also collect,” KAWS says, “to fully comprehend as well as support the world I work and live in. Ultimately for me, understanding art and artists leads you to other art and artists. It’s a never-ending conversation, and it’s exciting.”16
16 KAWS, quoted in “A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita,” Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane website, 2015, https://newcombartmuseum. tulane.edu/portfolio-item/kaws-shared-space/
VR If we go back to your memories as a child or a teenager, can you think of artists or art forms that you found particularly inspiring—or works you were compelled to possess—that later found their way into your collection? Which of these artists made a very strong impression?
KAWS Of course, I was looking at graffiti when I was younger, and the impact it has on me is still strong—still something that is exciting to me. When I think about seeing photographs of some of the subway trains, that holds as much—if not more—importance as any other art. FUTURA is a good friend now and growing up I was inspired by the stuff he did—or ZEPHYR or DONDI—and more recent artists like WEST and the FC guys, too. Even local neighborhood kids when I was younger, like WHAT4. And then you get into all the different bridges that these artists made into other territories, like skateboard graphics, T-shirts, and album art. You like one graphic and then you start to realize that these other graphics you also like are actually made by the same person. Suddenly you start to realize that there are groups of people behind the things that you are drawn to, and it goes from there. I still operate in a similar way when I investigate the artists that I collect today.
One reason I collect ’70s and ’80s graffiti is because I grew up feeling so strongly about this work but not seeing it in museums in the ’90s and early 2000s. It came in and out of galleries, but I don’t think there were many cohesive collections formed. Now I figure I’m in a place where I can put one together and pass it on when the right situation presents itself. I like looking for the original works that created this culture. Whether it’s album art, magazine art, skateboard graphics—I find it really interesting that somebody can
make something that takes on a life of its own and goes way beyond whatever the artist’s first intentions were.
You seem to be irritated by the question of art hierarchy, and stated the lack of critical writing about graffiti. These artists are not known for what they contributed individually, as if “it was all one nameless collective.” You have pointed out the way that art institutions missed an opportunity to explore the legacy and impact of these creators. Can you expand on this?
Unfortunately people are going to look at derivative objects influenced by graffiti instead of paying attention to the pioneers of that movement. People don’t realize there is a world to collect from and gather information from. Those works need to be gathered in order to at least form a base to start the conversation. Regardless of your take on graffiti, what other movement is really pervasive like that? It had such a global effect. The institutional art world is a relatively small bubble. Graffiti grew to influence contemporary visual culture worldwide. Here we are fifty years later, and there are still kids interested in this type of art long before they learn about a museum or a gallery. They meet up with a friend, and they paint. You also have the art of hip-hop flyers and all that stuff that PHASE 2, Buddy Esquire, and many others did. Corporate America is growing and feeding off that, so at the very least, people should get down to figuring out where it came from and who the innovators were. This was a huge driving art force.
Besides collecting graffiti artists, you have committed to significant acquisitions of works by self-taught artists on a scale that is not typical of many collectors in the United States. Not only do you seem to appreciate their inventive approach to art making, but you deconsecrate the importance of artistic training. Your support of various artistic languages, in a non-hierarchical way, is somehow political.
It’s a fact that you don’t need to go to school to make great work, but I never thought I was making a political act by collecting the art that I do. I just genuinely love the works I gravitate towards. Looking at a Susan Te Kahurangi King [FIG. 6] next to a Peter Saul [FIG. 7], both from the 1960s—the aesthetic, the language is similar; both great, but they are creating in two completely separate worlds. Self-taught artists happen to be making some of the best work out there. Like
Martín Ramírez, William Hall, Yuichiro Ukai, or Susan Te Kahurangi King. Those works are incredible; regardless of who made it, you can’t argue with the proof. It’s the work I keep returning to and thinking about.
What is the first work that you acquired?
When I was younger and doing graffiti, I would trade “black books” with other artists. They would draw in your book, and you would draw in their books. Sometimes that might go beyond a book thing into trading a small painting. That was some of the first art I owned by other artists.
One of the first pieces I bought from a gallery was in 2000. I got this Raymond Pettibon drawing, SWAK! One Sober Icy Kiss (1999), from David Zwirner. I’d been a fan of Pettibon for a while, and I bought this piece for myself for my birthday. Since “SWAK” is “KAWS” backwards, I saw it as a sign to pursue the purchase. The text in it is also great: “No love without fangs, no kiss without aftertaste.” At the time, it was just a purchase. I wasn’t thinking, “This is the first thing I’m buying for my collection,” but it turns out that it was.
One can see nuances between “accumulating” and “collecting.” When did you start looking at your acquisitions in terms of a collection? Do you remember a turning point in your activity?
There’s no distinction—I don’t think of it in that way. If anything, I kind of hate categories and labels. A lot of the works that I buy are part of my investigation of things. Sometimes I’m adding to a group of several works by one artist that I have already, because that new work represents a moment that isn’t in my collection; other times I buy anomalies—works I want to have around to investigate.
It’s one thing to look at something in a show. It’s another thing having it in your space for a couple years. You see how certain works can change with time. It can completely depend on the social climate, on whatever is going on in the world. Things jump out as being more important or less important.
It seems that beyond collecting the work of certain artists, you find strong visual connections with individual works. Even though you don’t necessarily seek to collect an artist’s full repertoire, you mentioned that in some cases you might want to complete an ensemble. For instance, you said: “That’s a great Wölfli, but I hope to eventually have smaller works that are going to inform it.”
Right. With an artist like Wölfli, I’m working with what’s available. There’s not an abundance to collect. Occasionally, I’ll see something that makes me think, “What do I need to sell in order to buy this?”— meaning selling my own work. Trust me, I would love to have all the best pieces from every artist, but I also like the small stuff, the notes, the ephemera that inform the other works. For instance, I really enjoy collecting Peter Saul’s early catalogs and invitations. I could show you boxes of graffiti ephemera, like Lee Quiñones’s Barbara Gladstone invitation from the ’80s or sign-in books from 51X gallery on the Lower East Side. I’m not actively seeking this work, but if it comes up, I’ll grab it. Before I could buy art, I bought books.
What kinds of books? Where do you find them?
Every kind of art book. I really like design and print applications, so my interests can stray in many directions. I collect black books like the ones I mentioned earlier. Sometimes artist’s sketchbooks—
even from when they were in college with notes from class. One time I bought a book from the Mudd Club—it was the sign-in book used during the Beyond Words exhibition that Keith Haring curated. People signed in simply with their name and address—everyone from George Condo to Kim Gordon, the whole of downtown. But then it hits the Beyond Words exhibition, and you have pages of graffiti artists just drawing. Artists like FUTURA 2000, CRASH, and DAZE all made drawings in this book. It also has a nice marker portrait of Keith that Basquiat drew [FIG. 8]. When people learn that you collect certain things, offers start to come out of the woodwork.
These are chronicles of a community at a very particular moment. What do you think of this notion of the “masterpiece.” Do you believe in such a term?
Saying something is “the best” is so subjective. I see things get elevated and whatever you call the reverse of that by people who feel entitled to do so. I’m always thinking, “Who is this person?” I’m not collecting like that. I’m looking for what I feel is the right thing, and I’m not thinking these are the masterpieces. I’m not collecting trophies or trying to create a church environment; it’s more of a library. When you think of how artists, over decades, change and transition, you understand why it’s great to be able to look at all of this work in person—to see firsthand how work goes back and forth. Here, we’re sitting in front of a 1960 and a 1982 Peter Saul, and they couldn’t be more different [FIGS. 9, 10]. Peter revisits imagery a lot.
How does the collection intersect with your own artistic practice?
For me, collecting is always an interesting distraction from making work. Buying work, looking at other artists’ work, and getting lost
in those things gets me out of my own space. And for that purpose, it’s a positive. Besides that, they all keep me company, honestly. For example in my home there’s Peter Saul’s Double de Kooning Duck (1979) [FIG. 11]. I see it every morning, and it is one of my favorite paintings. It’s behind my kids at the breakfast table. That painting led me to buy Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Woman IV (1982) [FIG. 12]. It’s fun to have Peter Saul interpreting a de Kooning painting next to Lichtenstein also interpreting a de Kooning painting. You couldn’t have more difference; they both make it their own. I like the idea that artists can make something, and then it’s out there in the world and part of everyone’s point of reference.
Your collecting activity is clearly one of many of your multifaceted creative endeavors. How do these works you collect serve as sounding boards for your artistic explorations?
It’s hard to know what makes you gravitate towards something. Sometimes it is a contrast to what I make or gives me other perspectives on making. I think of Robert Crumb: his whole career can exist within an eleven by fourteen scale. In one way or another, it can be a complete departure or a one-to-one inspiration that you see translated to my work. It can inform the work that I make. As an artist, intimately knowing the work that you collect is very different from looking at it in a gallery or a museum. When I am collecting
for myself, I have to sell my own works so that I have money to buy works. It’s putting skin in the game. It is not just endlessly acquiring. Every dollar I have ever spent on art comes from earnings from my own work. When I’m in the studio after walking up to my office and painting so tight all day, it’s refreshing to see Peter Saul’s 1960 painting. You learn about the many trajectories. Helen Rae started making drawings when she was fifty. Hilma af Klint was actively pursuing a career as an artist when she was younger, and then she decided to put her works away in storage for twenty years. Artists exist in many ways, and some are conscious—or not at all conscious— about the art world, the market, audiences.
If we look at some themes represented by your collection, can we say that it engages primarily with American culture and its unconscious, aside from a few exceptions like Adolf Wölfli, Louis Wain, and Hilma af Klint?
Human culture, more than American culture. I don’t think regionally about the work I collect. But of course I have an interest in New York. A lot of the artists, whether it’s Anton van Dalen, Martin Wong, or Jane Dickson, find inspiration in the city itself. I feel like they’ve walked the same streets that I would eventually find my way to, and that is interesting to me. But I don’t think that reflects the majority
of the collection. I look at artists from Japan, for instance, with the same appreciation as those in New York.
While your artistic practice is embedded in a vast community of peers, artists, collectors, gallerists, and museum professionals, your collecting practice seems to be a far more isolated or private process.
There’s no committee. I don’t check with anyone before buying something. I never thought about putting a show together like this one at The Drawing Center. I’m mostly private about what I collect aside from occasionally sharing stuff on Instagram. Once it becomes more public, I think that might take away from it. Curating this show is personal. I have put my own work out there for so many years, but this is a new type of exposure. This is sharing what I do in a different way. I mostly think of my collecting as research. It is a selfish way to live with and understand other art being made. Being with works day after day, looking at the differences between artists and the materials they each choose for communicatong their thoughts is the most rewarding part of this.
At The Drawing Center, for the first time, you have an opportunity to give many artworks from your collection a full spatial deployment on such a different scale. Was this exercise illuminating?
I think I mostly realized I might own too much work. I often think about works hanging in rooms together in these imaginary spaces in my mind. When it comes to actually editing down to fit an actual space, I find it really difficult. In some ways wish I could curate several solo shows. I thought this show was going to be a much smaller group of artists—ten to fifteen. I thought that I could show more of how I look at things, but then it was too hard because there are so many artists I would like people to see. I’m not a curator.
How do you situate yourself within the long legacy of “artist-collector,” like Jean Dubuffet, André Breton, Warhol, or Jim Shaw?
It’s not something I think about. I’ve always had collecting inclinations, starting with stamps, comic books, toys. Actually, I like the feeling of the Roger Brown Study Center in Chicago. Because it is what it is. It feels like a personal space, filled with his things. It doesn’t matter that he has an African mask next to a Jim Nutt drawing. That’s the way he wanted to put it, and that’s what you’re getting.
In the central area of the first gallery, you will install two iterations of your studio display—the current one and the previous. These were displays set in your studio on the second floor, where you meet with visitors. There is a table with products you designed and other collaborations and a couch where people sit; it is hard to not see the couch for its reference to psychoanalysis, as you sit in your rolling chair. Are there themes and compositions that unify these works and guided your installation?
Early on, I was compelled to recreate the studio display as two installations, because in a way it shows how I collect. I can go from one thought to another. I wanted to have the two studio installations in the show because it allows the visitors to experience the way that I live with the work. I will try to place it identically.
There is not a real unity across your collection. I see such contrasts, for instance, between the irreverence of Peter Saul and the internalized scientific concepts in abstract form of Hilma af Klint and the incredible travelogue of Adolf Wölfli. What is the thread?
People making marks. There are a thousand ways to exist as an artist and many different trajectories. One can have institutional success, non-institutional success, commercial success, no commercial success, or be completely ignored. A lot of people tend to get focused on hierarchy—what is “art world,” what is “commercial world,” what is “outsider” or “self-taught.” I never look at things like this. I look at the work. On the wall, all together, next to each other—all that other stuff falls aside. Helen Rae does better than most trained artists. There is no lack of confidence, only intention. There is a clarity because she wasn’t dealing with the bullshit, the market. I found that refreshing. It is one thing to see one good drawing by Helen, but it is another thing to fully realize time after time how much it’s hitting. And how dedicated she is, how consistent she is. There are fortyeight of her drawings in the show that are great. You have seen my office upstairs: if I have more options to look at, I am happier.
Are you interested in bringing back into this exhibition space the initial connection you had with the works—replaying that experience?
No, this is only this moment, and it’ll be what it is at this moment, and then tomorrow is another one. The pressure I feel is that I don’t want to do a disservice to any artist that I include or don’t include. I
want the show to be an uplifting experience. It’s presumptuous for me to put artists in a room together and say that “this is how I see things” without knowing how one might like or dislike the context. I’m approaching this the way I approach doing shows with my own work: I try to pull the works together as much as possible, knowing the space. And also allowing an openness, knowing that things change when you’re standing one-to-one with something.
Is The Way I See It a corrective lens for your ideal art history book? Or rather this artist-collector perspective that you wish to put at the forefront of the visitor’s experience?
Honestly, I don’t know what the balance is. I am not calculating— female artists, male artists, contemporary artists, illustrators. There are definitely things of great importance in this show that are not considered in the art history books or in the contemporary art world. There are a lot of different things going on in the show, but I see it as a starting point or a collection of points of entry for anyone who is interested in delving further.
Describing Brian Donnelly’s astonishing collection of thousands of works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, the art historian Thomas Crow asserts that it is an argument for “an alternative fine art tradition,” not merely an accumulation of objects.1 Indeed, the ambitious challenge to broaden the definition of great drawing to include graffiti sketches, comics, and illustrations—as well as the work of artists who are self-taught, neurodivergent, or have been otherwise overlooked or dismissed by the fine art establishment—is surprisingly met in The Way I See It, an exhibition of more than 350 works on paper chosen by Donnelly himself from his vast collection compiled over nearly twenty-five years of eager, inspired looking.
Donnelly is an artist who works under the pseudonym KAWS, and there is little doubt that his profession has had a profound impact on what he has chosen to collect. The inverse is also true: what Donnelly loves and has chosen to collect has had a significant impact on the kind of art KAWS has made over the course of a wildly successful career. After studying illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, an experience that he loved because it was a “trade school,”2 KAWS made a name for himself first as a graffiti artist whose tags morphed into intentional interventions on publicly-situated advertising on billboards and bus shelters. These performative acts of public drawing introduced KAWS’s signature vocabulary that starred a cohort of adorable but existentially burdened figures with Xs over their eyes, making them look like they were sleeping—or dead. These figures, which now appear in paintings
1 Thomas Crow, “Family Ties: The Characters of KAWS,” in Thomas Crow, Dan Nadel, Clare Lilley, KAWS (New York: Phaidon Press, 2023), 66.
2 Dan Nadel, “Dan Nadel in Conversation with KAWS,” in Crow et al., KAWS (New York: Phaidon Press, 2023), 12.
and as monumental sculpture, collectibles, and motifs on products continue to be popular internationally, making KAWS among the best-known visual artists on the planet—a position earned by working outside the conventional art world establishment and without the benefit of blue chip galleries, museums, or high-profile experts celebrating his artistic bona fides.
The connection between KAWS’s production as an artist and his collection is not straightforward, but both his artistic practice and his collecting one seem bent on changing the aesthetic rules for the creation and reception of contemporary art. “I feel like we grew up on a model of what a visual artist can be,” he confided to Dan Nadel in an interview published in 2023, “I don’t think it needs to end there. I feel that there could be more.”3 That “more” resides in KAWS’s collection, a veritable garden of masterpieces by well-known and unknown artists. The collection features areas of depth: holdings of works by Peter Saul, H.C. Westermann, Helen Rae, and Susan Te Kahurangi King run in the high double digits. The collection also includes entire archives: “black books” of sketches by some of the best-known American graffiti writers and the artistic estate of Rae are two examples. He has amassed equally comprehensive and impressive groups of drawings by historically significant selftaught maestros like Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Henry Darger, a group that is counterbalanced by holdings in drawings by canonical artists like Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and contemporary artists like Dana Schutz. When asked about the variety represented in his trove he gnomically commented, “I do like playing with systems.”4
KAWS’s career has successfully bridged the gap between sotermed commercial art and fine art, a stubborn gulf in contemporary American culture that still upholds a hierarchy created by museums and academics in the business of constructing stories of innovation, influence, and progress in visual art that function like mathematics problems always producing a logical, better result. A traditional art museum display is built on “hierarchies of value” presented as “natural truths.”5 In reality though, hierarchies that prize, for example, art by educated Europeans over self-taught ones or objects created to be looked at rather than utilized are social constructions
3 Nadel, 20.
4 Ibid., 40.
5 Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1995), 141.
created by a ruling culture to shore up its values.6
KAWS’s career has challenged and to some extent bested the hegemonic lens of the institutional art world in part because of the international popularity of everything he makes, whether it is a painting or a collectible doll. The content of his collection likewise implicitly questions the gate-keeping power of the art institution. Going a step further—after obliterating barriers to the inclusion of socalled “commercial art” as well as artists working outside of cultural centers who have not trained as artists—the collection radically expands our understanding of what constitutes a work of art in the largest sense. It should come as no surprise that by broadening the fine art lens to include genius in a whole host of creative genres, a flood of artists who are women, people of color, neurodivergent, disabled, and elderly become part of this new artistic pantheon.
While the most obvious thread that ties a collection together is the collector’s personal taste, there are commonalities of form and strategy that visually connect artists in a collection that includes work by both Abstract Expressionist hero de Kooning and self-taught, deaf, non-verbal artist Helen Rae. Crow succinctly summarizes the connection between the diverse works in KAWS’s collection as “figurative work friendly to vernacular forms,”7 a helpful description though it subtly privileges the generic fine art phrase “figurative work” by designating it as the generative form that describes a supposedly fine art “unfriendly” cohort of underground comix, graffiti writing, and the like. Carlo McCormick, the impresario and critic of record of the wildly eclectic East Village art scene in New York in the 1980s, has a more nuanced take. Noting that KAWS himself cannot be altogether accurately labeled “an artist who does commercial art,” he emphasizes that he is not “a commercial artist who does fine art” either.8 In McCormick’s eyes, KAWS’s oeuvre is decidedly hybrid, functioning in both accessible commercial markets including fashion, skate culture, popular music, toys and collectibles, and in fine art precincts in major cities around the globe. The same can be said for the art that he has amassed.
KAWS has neatly identified the divide between these two areas as a matter of “distribution,”9 but there is also an issue of reception.
6 Pearce, 141.
7 Crow, 66.
8 Carlo McCormick, “KAWS’ World,” Paper Magazine 30, no. 3: November 2013.
9 Ibid. KAWS remarked to McCormick that “distribution” explained the difference between fine art and commercial art.
However accessible digital media has made images of objects, the audience for KAWS’s figurines and T-shirts still very likely differs from those who covet the paintings and sculptures he exhibits in galleries. It is in this divide that KAWS’s collection does its radical work. Many drawings featured in The Way I See It have standing in both the world of popular arts and in the art museum. In fact, KAWS’s first purchase of a work of art from an art gallery was a drawing by the Los Angeles-bred, New York-based artist Raymond Pettibon.10 Beginning in the 1970s, Pettibon has deployed a blackand-white pen-and-ink drawing style directly inspired by comic strips. Gleefully stealing characters from comic books and animation from 1950s and ’60s America like Gumby and Vavoom, the screaming character from the Felix the Cat comics, Pettibon chooses to draw individual scenes—as opposed to narrative comic-strip sequences— which he initially self-published in zines or gave to his musician brother to use as cover art on his bands’ albums. Each drawing is captioned, but the statements cribbed by Pettibon come from entirely different kinds of sources than typically found in comics, including European philosophical essays, novels, and historical epigrams. Within each Pettibon is a clash of sources that makes his work neither comics nor so-called “fine art” drawing. They are hybrids or, more interestingly, bridges between two cultural worlds that might flirt with one another while keeping their distance. More daring than the comic appropriations of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings or the riffs on commerce that are Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes—both of which created their frissons by dragging bits of mass culture into high art domains—Pettibon’s drawings refuse both contexts of high and low, a radical position to take in a field based on taxonomies. KAWS is resistant to the idea of defining his own practice within specific categories. As he commented in a recent interview about his own work, “People tend to make categories for everything. I don’t consciously stay within a category. Works have their presence and speak to you in different ways, and I don’t need to fully understand it to take time to appreciate it.” This is also true for his collection. “There isn’t one type of work that I am drawn to,” he emphasized recently in a discussion about the art he buys, “it’s dozens!”11 The most obvious connection is that all of the works in the show are more or less figurative. With the exception of the sublime quasi abstract
10 Too intimidated to walk into a major art gallery, Donnelly actually purchased the work from an online viewing room.
11 KAWS, unpublished interview with the author, June 12, 2024.
floral pen drawings by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983), a self-taught Milwaukeean who called himself a “Freelance Artist— Poet and Sculptor—Innovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher,” figuration reigns. As does a preference for the graphic—sharp lines, bright colors, eye-catching compositions. Realism, Photorealism, and even trompe l’oeil are everywhere in the collection, a testament to a compiler’s taste for skillful draftsmanship. This ability to draw with hyper-accurate, eye-fooling realism is what Crow calls the kind of “defiant skills” that qualify “for inclusion in KAWS’ pantheon.”12
“Defiant” is a telling adjective for an art historian like Crow, whose expertise ranges from nineteenth-century Impressionism to the work of Andy Warhol, because it speaks to a clear agitation against the status quo, which in this case is the European modernist tradition. As the admittedly bracing teleology of Euro-American art history tells us, once a credible facsimile of three dimensions was achieved on a twodimensional surface—first through the use of perspective and oil paint and subsequently with the invention of the photograph in the early nineteenth century, art “advanced” through innovations in form, building towards total non-objectivity. To certain idealists, art was on a trajectory to unleash itself from what we know in order to pursue the broader mystery of existence, not through imitation, but through the imagination. At mid twentieth century, the European continent lay in actual ruins, but it was also ideologically bifurcated by two of the victorious countries at odds with one another: the United States and the U.S.S.R. In culture, the United States flooded Western Europe with money, movies, and material aid, but the American government, partnering with major museums, also organized art exhibitions of abstract painting—artworks that were larger and more unruly than the domestic-scaled geometries of the remnants of the ateliers of the School of Paris and that, most importantly, told no stories beyond those implied through color and gesture. Whether or not governmentsponsored exhibitions like the retrospective of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, which swept through major European capitals in 1957, two years after the artist’s death, had a government-sponsored political impetus at the time has been excavated only in retrospect,13
12 Crow, 52.
13 See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum, Summer 1974; and other scholarship on the intervention into visual culture by the government in midcentury America.
but by the end of World War II artistic styles in Europe and the United States were deeply politicized. Social (or Socialist) Realism had been adopted as the state style of the Soviet Union in 1934, while in Nazi Germany, Hitler and his henchmen began a campaign against abstraction, labeling it a “degenerate” product of Judaism, Communism, or both. Fascism was defeated, but for some the taint of totalitarian politics stuck to the language of realism in Europe. The new American abstraction then, aided by enthusiastic US propaganda, seemed to present an antidote to the hectoring readability of Social Realist murals and monuments. Paintings by Pollock or Mark Rothko or Franz Kline were full of emotion and formal incident, but they existed on a plane reserved for art, divorced from daily life and the realpolitik of the burgeoning Cold War.
It seems simplistic to argue that by the mid-1950s in the United States and in Europe, a great deal of figuration was categorized as either an indication of Communist sympathies or reactionary ones. But the assertion is no less true for being obvious. This tension between high and low, elite taste and the popular kind played out in the United States as well. The most popular artist in America at midcentury was the hyperrealist painter of rural America, Andrew Wyeth, but high art institutions and critics mostly ignored him. Though purchased by major museums for astonishing sums for the time, Wyeth’s paintings were hung in museum hallways or not at all, as their existence contradicted the triumphant story of modernist abstraction being concocted by American cultural institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. In art magazines, Wyeth’s work was gleefully pitted against Pollock’s paintings as a fight between the reactionary and the avant-garde, the full-throated defense of Wyeth by Abstract Expressionist painter and Artnews critic Elaine de Kooning notwithstanding.14
Skipping seventy years to the first two decades of the new millennium, we find ourselves surrounded by contemporary artists working in myriad styles and diverse materials. Stylistic ideology seems to have been drowned in joyful eclecticism, as staunchly modernist institutions cede wall space not necessarily to Wyeth (perhaps a bridge too far?), but to Alice Neel, T.C. Cannon, Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, and Salman Toor. In the contemporary
14 See “Andrew Wyeth Paints a Picture,” Artnews 49, no. 1 (March 1950): 38–41, 54–56. Wyeth did turn out to be an artist of the political right wing, a position that he signaled publicly by declining an invitation to the White House by John F. Kennedy and later accepting one from Richard Nixon.
discourse in Europe and America in the 2020s, figuration has shed its reactionary/radical political connotations, but unspoken taboos barring “popular” art forms like comics, illustrations, and graffiti writing from art museums and galleries showing contemporary art by trained artists still remain. Some of the greatest drawings of the twentieth century were produced by self-taught artists like Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), comic book creators like R. Crumb (b. 1943), and graffiti writers like Lee Quiñones (b. 1960), and it is this kind of work that KAWS delights in, celebrates, and collects with scholarly diligence. The proof ultimately lies with what we see with our own eyes. Most of us know a great drawing when we see it, and in The Way I See It, we encounter hundreds of them, from Hilma af Klint’s (1862–1944) vision of an aurora to Anton van Dalen’s (1938–2024) shadowy East Village street scenes.
In a comprehensive study of the social history of collecting, the British academic Susan Pearce defines a collection as “a group of objects, brought together with intention and sharing a common identity of some kind, which is regarded by its owner as, in some sense, special or set apart.”15 Sets of objects organized obsessively, collections are “an act of the imagination…”16 and a “metaphor intended to create meanings which help to make individual identity and each individual’s view of the world.”17 Pearce makes the argument that the idea of collecting is at base an act of preservation and ordering; in other words, a modern way of figuring things out, born of the belief that making sense of vast data sets is a hedge against the chaos and mystery of the world around us. “The establishment of a patterned system into which all the diversity of nature could be fitted chimed in at once with the deist theory of the Enlightenment, and the corresponding modernist belief that the physical process of material observation and measurement by a rational man could result in objective knowledge and truth,” she writes.18 For Pearce, collecting is a perfect example of a kind of vertical mapping of history that privileges a single storyline of innovation and progress, discoverable through quasi-scientific acts of taxonomy. If one buys that the act of collecting itself is an expression of a modern view of human progress, then KAWS’s accumulation of thousands of artworks is one of the many views of culture we can
15 Pearce, 159.
16 Ibid., 21.
17 Ibid., 72.
18 Ibid., 124.
enjoy now that modernism has gotten out of the way. In Pearce’s view, it might not be a collection at all as in sum it creates not a roadmap to the stars, but a horizontal landscape without visible borders of vastly different kinds of creativity on paper.
“Collections can be used to construct a world which is closer to things as we would like them to be, and the colloquial use of ‘things’ in a phrase such as this is revealing. We can use them as a material dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘me,’ and so create a way of working out an intentional inscription on the world,” Pearce writes.19 KAWS reveals that for him, collecting is much more than a pleasurable hobby. “It’s like food,” he told Dan Nadel. “It’s like energy. It’s what keeps me thinking.” He continues, “I guess that collecting is like having skin in the game.”20 This admission is as close as KAWS gets to revealing that there is a purpose to all of this acquisition. Taken as a whole, the artists in KAWS’s collection create “an alternative fine-art tradition to which [KAWS] could imagine belonging.”21 While the KAWS collection proposes a broader, more inclusive history of draftsmanship, at the same time it creates a rich context for the artwork by artists whose work has rarely been featured on museum or gallery walls. “The objects I collect are what I’ve gravitated towards my whole life, and how I felt my whole life,” he commented to Nadel, concluding however that, “I still feel outside.”22
Crow argues that KAWS’s all-encompassing art project plus his collecting “add up to a persuasively alternative history of recent art that supplants the faltering textbook versions still holding sway over young artists,”23 even as the collection does “not demonstrate knowledge.”24 It is knowledge. This is borne out in KAWS’s carefully assembled groups of things, some of which we have never seen before; many, we never considered under the rubric of art. The Way I See It offers an entirely new body of information that has the potential to alter the landscape of the known world of contemporary visual culture. It is neither a roadmap nor a lens but rather a welcoming entrance to a broader, more scintillating, more nuanced, more diverse universe of human creativity whose only boundary is the human vision that has discovered it.
19 Ibid., 176.
20 Nadel, 43.
21 Crow, 66.
22 Nadel, 41.
23 Crow, 52.
24 Pearce, 111.
Brooklyn native Joyce Pensato (1941–2019) gained recognition relatively late in her career, participating in group exhibitions starting around 1993 and receiving her first solo exhibition in 2007 at sixty-six years old. As a young woman, Pensato studied at the Art Students League in New York and then the New York Studio School, where she enrolled in 1973 and remained as a resident for several years after she graduated. She started making still-life drawings of pop culture detritus found on the street and in thrift shops while at the Studio School, the first being a charcoal drawing of a life-size Batman cardboard cutout. However, she considered her Abstract Expressionist landscape paintings the primary part of her artistic production at the time. In the 1990s, Pensato decided to abandon colorful oil painting and began to translate her charcoal figures into black, white, and silver enamel paintings. Her subjects include icons of American popular culture, from Muppets to Disney characters, The Simpsons, and superheroes, as well as her own character, The Juicer, rendered so they vibrate with menace and emotion. —IK
American cartoonist and illustrator Basil Wolverton (1909–1978) is best known for his grotesques and monsters, which have graced Mad magazine, Timely Comics (the proto-Marvel Comics), Stan Lee’s Atlas Comics, and cards and posters for the Topps Company. Wolverton was born in Oregon, where he lived and worked his entire life, choosing to mail his work to publishers rather than relocating to a publishing center like New York. He sold his first cartoon in 1926 and his first comic strip in 1929 to America's Humor Magazine and the Independent Syndicate of New York respectively, but remained unpublished until 1938, when he published a science fiction comic story called Spacehawks in Circus, The Comic Riot. In 1946, Wolverton submitted the winning entry to a contest run by the Li’l Abner comic—to design the character Lena Hyena, the ugliest woman in the world—surpassing about 500,000 other submissions
and gaining a larger audience for his work. He subsequently contributed grotesque faces to Mad magazine, including the famous cover of issue 11 parodying Life Magazine ’s “Beautiful Girl of the Month” feature. In 1966, Wolverton collaborated with Norman Saunders and Wally Wood on the Make Your Own Name Stickers series, and in 1968 he created the Ugly HangUps series of posters, both for the Topps Company. While his career primarily comprised humor and horror comics and cartoons, after becoming a born-again Christian and follower of radio cult Radio Church of God in 1943, Wolverton undertook a project to illustrate every chapter of the Old Testament, which was published from 1958 to 1969. Wolverton’s warped faces and distinctive hatching style influenced future generations of comic artists including R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman, and he was given an honorary Eisner Award in 2000. —IK
Illustrator Norman Saunders (1907–1989) is best known as a painter of midcentury pulp magazine and novel covers, and for his work with the Topps Company, which produced, most notably, Bazooka Joe and Garbage Pail Kids. Saunders spent his early life in Minnesota, eventually taking art courses at the Federal Schools Inc. of Minneapolis. He began working as an artist for local publisher Fawcett Publication in 1927, primarily creating pulp magazine covers. In 1934, Saunders relocated to New York City, attending classes at the Grand Central School of Art where he studied under well-known American painter and former WWI artist-correspondent Harvey Dunn. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s Saunders created pulp illustrations for magazines that ranged in genre from detective stories to romance, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and more. When pulp magazines began to fall out of fashion, Saunders switched to illustrating pulp book covers, and in 1958 he began to draw for the Topps Company. He contributed to a number of products at Topps including the Mars Attacks cards, Batman cards, Wacky Packages cards, and the Make Your Own Name Stickers for which he collaborated with Basil Wolverton and Wally Wood. —IK
Wally Wood (1927–1981) was an artist immersed in the midcentury comic industry. He is best known for his work on the early issues of Marvel’s Daredevil, for his designs for Mars Attacks, for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents published by Tower Comics, and for being one of the early contributors to Mad. Wood joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1944, serving for three years during and immediately after World War II before moving to New York, where, with the help of the G.I. Bill, he attended classes in lettering, anatomy, and drawing at Hogarth School for Cartoonists & Illustrators, now the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Entering the New York comic industry in the late 1940s, Wood worked with comic and pulp magazine publishers in a range of genres, including humor, science fiction, and horror, eventually also contributing drawings to men’s magazines like Playboy. Wood began working with the Topps Company in 1962, contributing designs to card series including Mars Attacks, Ugly Stickers, Crazy Little Comics, Nasty Notes, and the Make Your Own Name Stickers alongside fellow artists. —IK PLS. 12–23
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a pioneering Swedish artist, considered by some as Europe’s first abstract painter, predating Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. Born in Stockholm, she graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 1887, initially painting landscapes, portraits, and botanical subjects. Her secretive exploration of abstract art began in 1906, influenced by spiritualism and the occult, particularly through her weekly seances with “The Five,” a group of female artists. Af Klint’s work took a dramatic turn after receiving a commission from an entity named Amaliel in 1904, which led to her creation of The Paintings for the Temple series, a collection of 193 works completed between 1906 and 1915. These vibrant, largescale paintings feature a complex lexicon of symbols that include spirals (representing evolution), “U” (denoting the spiritual world), “W” (for matter), and concentric circles (for unity). Despite her groundbreaking work, af Klint remained largely unknown during her lifetime. She stipulated in her will that her work should not be exhibited until twenty years after her death. It was not until the 1986 exhibition The Spiritual in Art in Los Angeles that her contributions began to receive wider recognition.
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) left Mexico for the United States in 1925, hoping to find work to support his wife and four children. Settling in California, Ramírez worked on railroads. The letters he sent home to his family, who remained in Mexico, included drawings in the margins, but the bulk of his extant artistic production is dated later, picking up in 1948. Three years into the Great Depression, Ramírez, along with many of his peers, lost his job and was forced into homelessness. This situation, exacerbated by a breakdown in communication between Ramírez and California authorities, led to his incarceration in 1931, followed by diagnoses of manic depression and, later, catatonic schizophrenia. Ramírez was transferred between several hospitals in Northern California, finally landing in DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, in 1948. During this time, Ramírez began to create art with hospital supplies, including sheets of operating paper, masticated newspaper, paper bags, and mashed potatoes used to paste multiple sheets of paper together. At DeWitt State Hospital, psychologist Tarmo Pasto began saving and archiving Ramírez’s work. The artist created about 300 drawings between 1948 and his death in 1963, usually pulling from his past experiences as subject matter. His caballeros and churches take their appearances from those in Ramírez’s home state of Jalisco, Mexico, while trains and mountains reference his time as a railroad worker. —IK
PL. 25
Untitled (Caballero), c. 1950
Crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
49 x 44 1/2 inches (124.5 x 113 cm)
PL. 26
Untitled (Horse and Rider), 1954
Pencil, color pencil, collage, and crayon on paper
26 1/8 x 30 1/8 inches (66.3 x 76.5 cm)
PL. 27
Untitled (Trains and Tunnels), 1954
Pencil, color pencil, crayon, and watercolor on paper
36 x 41 1/4 inches (91.4 x 104.8 cm)
PL. 28
Untitled (Horse and Rider), 1954
Gouache, color pencil, and graphite on paper
33 1/8 x 23 15/16 inches (84 x 60.8 cm)
PL. 29
Untitled (Aztec), c. 1960–63
Gouache and graphite on pieced paper
24 1/2 x 15 inches (62.2 x 38.1 cm)
PL. 30
Untitled (Horse and Rider), c. 1950
Color pencil, crayon, and collage on paper
37 x 17 1/2 inches (94 x 44.4 cm)
Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) was a Swiss artist who began drawing in 1904 during his incarceration at the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric facility in Bern. While at Waldau (1895 until his death in 1930), Wölfli created a series of over 25,000 autobiographical drawings and collages in addition to a collection of smaller works that he called “bread art” because he sold them in order to purchase art supplies. In the artist’s forty-five volumes of work, he utilized decorative borders, saturated color, poetry, and musical composition to recount a fanciful version of his life. Wölfli was orphaned at ten, after which he entered the Swiss foster system. Indentured as a farm laborer while still a child, he continued to work on farms while in the foster system, finally able to leave when he was eighteen. He became a handyman upon moving to Bern, where he was incarcerated twice for child abuse before being institutionalized at Waldau for a similar crime at age thirty-five. At Waldau, Wölfli exhibited violent behavior that subsided somewhat when he drew. Interested in the effect that artmaking had on Wölfli, psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler, who worked at the facility, wrote a study based on Wölfli, entitled “Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler” (A mentally ill person as artist), which had the added effect of documenting and sharing the artist’s work. —IK
PL. 31
Genanttes Heimwesen, Probsten=Loch Blatt aus Heft N° 13, 1915
Graphite and color pencil on newsprint 28
PL. 32
Blatt aus Heft no. 13, c. 1916
Graphite and color pencil on paper
39 x 28 inches (99 x 71.1 cm)
PL. 33
Die Himmels Leiter, 1915
Graphite and color pencil on paper
39 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches (99.7 x 71.7 cm)
Yuichiro Ukai (1995–) creates dense compositions layering yōkai, animals and insects, characters from anime and manga, characters from Western cartoons, skeletons, dinosaurs, and imagery from Japanese epics into dense tapestries of color and pattern on the page. Often made on large sheets of brown paper, these drawings frequently repeat the same forms over and over, even across multiple panels, alluding to a narrative that travels right to left across several drawings. After graduating high school in 2014, Ukai joined Atelier Yamanami in Shiga Prefecture, an art workshop and living facility founded in 1986 to provide space, resources, and training to artists with mental and physical disabilities. The artist splits his time between Atelier Yamanami and his work as a custodian. Ukai’s drawings were first exhibited in 2018 at Harvard University Asia Center in Massachusetts, and in 2020 one of his works was acquired by the American Folk Art Museum. —IK
PL. 34
Untitled, 2022
Marker, ink, and color pencil on cardboard
28 3/4 x 32 1/2 inches (73 x 82.5 cm)
PL. 35
Untitled (No. 61), 2023
Color pencil, marker, oil pastel, and ink on cardboard
29 x 32 1/2 inches (73.6 x 82.5 cm)
PL. 36
Untitled (No. 62), 2023
Color pencil, marker, oil pastel, and ink on cardboard
29 x 32 1/2 inches (73.6 x 82.5 cm)
PL. 37
Untitled (No. 60), 2023
Color pencil, marker, oil pastel, and ink on cardboard
29 x 32 1/2 inches (73.6 x 82.5 cm)
Though she had been creating them since 1990, Helen Rae’s (1938–2021) vibrant, stylish color pencil and graphite reimaginings of fashion spreads from the pages of magazines like Vogue were not exhibited until 2015. Rae began drawing in 1990, when her mother enrolled her in First Street Gallery and Art Center, a Californiabased art establishment for adults with developmental disabilities. Drawing continuously for the rest of her life, Rae created a body of work that reinterprets the quiet, sleek images of the fashion world with warped, emotive forms, flattened spaces, and patches of bold pattern. Following her first solo exhibition at The Good Luck Gallery in 2015, which sold out the night it opened, interest in Rae’s work greatly increased. Her drawings have since appeared in exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris as well as in Scotland, Belgium, and Japan. —IK
PL. 38
Untitled (June 7, 2019), 2019
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 39
Untitled (January 2, 2015), 2015
Color pencil and graphite on paper
23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (59.7 x 44.4 cm)
PL. 40
Untitled (December 13, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 1/4 x 18 1/4 inches (61.6 x 46.3 cm)
PL. 41
Untitled (July 9, 2010), 2010
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 42
Untitled (March 6, 2019), 2019
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 43
Untitled (June 25, 2019), 2019
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 44
Untitled (February 2, 2010), 2010
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 45
Untitled (July 6, 2015), 2015 Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 46
Untitled (January 18, 2008), 2008 Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 47
Untitled (March 4, 2013), 2013 Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 48
Untitled (June 29, 2009), 2009
Oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper
23 5/8 x 17 3/4 inches (60 x 45 cm)
PL. 49
Untitled (June 25, 2012), 2012
Color pencil and graphite on paper
23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (59.7 x 44.4 cm)
PL. 50
Untitled (March 4, 2020), 2020
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 1/4 x 18 inches (61.6 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 51
Untitled (December 19, 2013), 2013 Color pencil and graphite on paper
23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (59.7 x 44.4 cm)
PL. 52
Untitled (March 6, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 53
Untitled (June 28, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 54
Untitled (December 6, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 55
Untitled (January 23, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 56
Untitled (May 16, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 57
Untitled (July 12, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 58
Untitled (October 25, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 59
Untitled (June 19, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 60
Untitled (August 22, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 61
Untitled (October 11, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 62
Untitled (March 10, 2010), 2010
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 1/4 x 18 inches (61.6 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 63
Untitled (April 28, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 64
Untitled (July 13, 2007), 2007
Mixed media on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 65
Untitled (January 19, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 66
Untitled (October 22, 2014), 2014
Color pencil and graphite on paper
23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (59.7 x 44.4 cm)
PL. 67
Untitled (December 22, 2017), 2017
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 68
Untitled (July 22, 2009), 2009
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 69
Untitled (March 1, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 70
Untitled (May 24, 2018), 2018
Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 71
Untitled (July 29, 2014), 2014 Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 72
Untitled (December 15, 2014), 2014
Color pencil and graphite on paper
23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (59.7 x 44.4 cm)
PL. 73
Untitled (January 24, 2020), 2020 Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 1/4 x 18 1/4 inches (61.6 x 46.3 cm)
PL. 74
Untitled (December 21, 2016), 2016 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 75
Untitled (January 30, 2014), 2014 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 76
Untitled (November 18, 2014), 2014 Color pencil on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 77
Untitled (April 2, 2010), 2010 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 78
Untitled (July 21, 2008), 2008 Color pencil on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 79
Untitled (August 8, 2019), 2019 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 80
Untitled (August 8, 2017), 2017 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 81
Untitled (April 11, 2019), 2019 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 82
Untitled (January 11, 2013), 2013 Color pencil and graphite on paper 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 83
Untitled (March 27, 2015), 2015 Oil pastels, color pencil, and graphite on paper
23 5/8 x 17 3/4 inches (60 x 45 cm)
PL. 84
Untitled (February 13, 2020), 2020 Color pencil and graphite on paper
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 85
Untitled (December 3, 2014), 2014 Color pencil and graphite on paper
23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (59.7 x 44.4 cm)
The Chicago-born artist Jane Dickson (1952–) is known for her evocative paintings, drawings, and prints that delve into the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson's artistic journey was shaped by late-1970s punk and alternative counterculture in New York, where she was active in artist collectives like Fashion Moda and Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), which staged the landmark Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show in 1980. In 1978, Dickson responded to a wanted ad in The New York Times for an “artist…willing to learn computers,” which led to her employment as the nighttime programmer of Spectacolor, the first electronic billboard at One Times Square. She used the opportunity to pioneer some of the first widely-seen digital art and animations of the time as well as to curate projects by her friends and colleagues, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and David Hammons. Dickson’s cinematic and fluorescent depictions of Times Square—where she lived in a loft on 43rd Street for nearly three decades—feature motels, strip clubs, sex shops, and late-night diners irradiated by the surrounding neon signs and colossal marquees, offering a powerful and penetrating commentary on American values and social strata.
Anton van Dalen’s (1945–2024) career spanned decades and continents and was marked by a deep engagement with urban culture and activism. Born in the Netherlands, van Dalen studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he was influenced by the political upheavals of the late 1960s and developed a keen interest in social issues and artistic expression as means of protest. In 1969, van Dalen moved to New York City and became immersed in the Lower East Side’s vibrant avant-garde art movement. His early works often incorporated themes of urban decay, identity, and community, reflecting the gritty reality of the city amidst social and political turmoil. His distinctive style merges bold contrasts, intricate patterns, and symbolic imagery drawn from mythology, folklore, and urban life. Central to his work is a fascination with the human psyche and the intersections of culture, history, and personal identity. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, van Dalen’s art evolved alongside his activism. He cofounded Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), a pioneering artist collective that challenged traditional art practices and advocated for social change. Van Dalen’s contributions to Colab's groundbreaking exhibitions, such as The Times Square Show, held in a shuttered massage parlor in 1980, cemented his reputation as a boundary-pushing artist unafraid to confront societal norms. —RD
PL. 89
Alpha y Omega with Dog, 1977
Graphite on paper
29 x 23 inches (73.66 x 58.42 cm)
PL. 90
Abandoned Car with Dog and TV, 1977
Graphite on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.4 x 73.7 cm)
PL. 91
Night Synagogue and Stripped Car, 1976
Graphite on paper
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
PL. 92
Car, Jesus Saves and P.R. Flag, 1982
Graphite on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.4 x 73.7 cm)
PL. 93
Street Debris on Sidewalk, 1975
Graphite on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.42 x 73.66 cm)
PL. 94
Street Debris, In and Out of Shadow, 1975
Graphite on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.42 x 73.66 cm)
PL. 95
Ave. A & E. 11 St #13, 1976
Graphite on paper
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Lee Quiñones (1960–) grew up on New York’s Lower East Side at the dawn of the New York graffiti movement and began painting subway cars at thirteen years old. By the end of the 1970s, he had painted over a hundred subway cars, including covering an entire ten-car train with his crew the Fabulous 5ive, and had gained a reputation as one of the pioneers of New York graffiti writing. Quiñones was also one of the first artists to bring subway writing out of the subway: he created a handball court mural, Howard the Duck, in 1978 and began making work with spray paint on canvas around the same time. By 1980, Quiñones had shown his spray-painted canvases at home and abroad, most notably in the pivotal Times Square Show. This collaborative, communitybased stepping stone in the early careers of over a hundred artists also included the work of JeanMichel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Hammons, and Kiki Smith, among many others. Quiñones was interested in introducing narrative and characters into his paintings, adding to the artist’s name that typically made up the bulk of a subway writer’s compositions.
“Lee,” the artist’s middle name and moniker of choice, is short and easy to write quickly, which allowed Quiñones to both cover subway cars quickly and devote more time to the other elements in his pieces. —IK
PL. 96
Heart Break, 1978
Alcohol marker and ink on Strathmore drawing pad paper
12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 97
Hot Rod from Hell (The Fabulous 5), 1977
Alcohol marker and ink on Strathmore drawing pad paper
12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 98
Hagar the Horrible, 1978
Alcohol marker and spray paint on Strathmore drawing pad paper
12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 99
War of the Worlds, 1976
Alcohol marker and Buffalo water marker on pad paper
13 3/4 x 43 3/4 inches (34.9 x 111.1 cm)
PL. 100
Silent Thunder (Whole Car), 1984
Alcohol marker and pencil on paper
4 1/4 x 28 1/2 inches (10.8 x 72.4 cm)
PL. 101
Lee Has Quit, 1977
Alcohol marker and Buffalo water marker on card stock
9 x 22 inches (55.9 x 22.9 cm)
PL. 102
One Million B.C., 1977
Alcohol marker on folder card stock
8 3/4 x 29 1/2 inches (22.2 x 74.9 cm)
PL. 103
Subway Car Montage, 1981
Alcohol marker and pencil on paper
26 5/16 x 32 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches (66.8 x 81.9 x 3.8 cm)
PL. 104
Subway Car Montage, Study #2, 1980–1983
Alcohol marker, pencil, ink on illustration board
22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches (57.2 x 72.4 cm)
PL. 105
Battlestar Galactica, 1979
Alcohol marker on Strathmore drawing pad paper
21 1/4 x 28 inches (54 x 71.1 cm)
PL. 106
Fabulous Ave, 1977
Alcohol marker and ink on Bristol paper
11 3/4 x 18 inches (45.7 x 29.8 cm)
The career of artist Ed Ruscha (1937–) spans six decades and is characterized by work that deftly presents the mundane, from places to phrases, for deeper consideration. As a student at Chouinard Art Institute, Ruscha soaked in the influence of earlier movements like Dadaism and Surrealism, letting them inform his own recontextualization of the everyday. After graduating in 1960, he worked for advertising agencies, where communication, graphics, text, typography, and meaning were all part of his daily consideration. Much of Ruscha’s work is text-based, rendering phrases and even his own name with a directness that forces the viewer to understand the artwork as an object as well as the meaning, or lack thereof, built into common vernacular. Ruscha’s career has encompassed drawing, painting, photography, art books, prints, film, and installation. In these works he has reflected on logos, the gasoline stations of Route 66, mountains, tires, and the American flag. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles. —IK
Born Leonard Hilton McGurr (1955–) in New York City, FUTURA 2000 (also known as FUTURA) is a trailblazer in graffiti art, emerging as a prominent figure in the late 1970s. His early work was marked by a fascination with abstraction and futurism, enduring elements that would become central to his artistic identity. A pivotal moment in his career came in 1980 when he, along with graffiti artist DONDI, visited a Bronx train yard to bomb the side of an entire train car in a piece that he titled Break. This iconic mural, characterized by its dynamic and non-representational forms, set a new standard in graffiti art by focusing on fluid shapes and abstract compositions, unlike conventional text-based graffiti. In the early 1980s, FUTURA began exhibiting in galleries such as Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, alongside contemporaries that included Keith Haring, RAMMELLZEE, DONDI, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also expanded into music, designing the iconic cover for The Clash’s single “This is Radio Clash” and performing live art during the band’s Combat Rock tour. As street culture evolved in the 1990s, FUTURA embraced commercial collaborations with brands like Supreme and Louis Vuitton, and he continues today as a dynamic force in both the art and fashion worlds. —RD
Born and raised in New York City, Eric Haze (1961–) has worked across the mediums of graffiti, street art, and graphic design for over forty years, playing a crucial role in defining the visual language of hip-hop during its formative years. Haze first exhibited his work in 1974 as part of the pioneering graffiti collective The Soul Artists, of which he was a founding member. He went on to show alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 1980s. Transitioning from fine art to commercial art in the mid-1980s, Haze became a leading graphic designer for the burgeoning hip-hop movement, crafting nowcelebrated logos—including the iconic emblems for Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys—and album covers that defined the aesthetic of an era. —RD
RAMMELLZEE (1960–2010) started train writing on the New York subways at just nine years old, going by the name Stimulation Assassination: Tagmaster Killer. By nineteen, he had decided to legally change his name to RAMM:ELL:ZEE. Letters and language were central to how RAMMELLZEE approached his career as an artist, musician, fashion designer, performer, and philosopher. He viewed subway writing, hip-hop, rap, and the related art forms emerging at the time as part of a cultural whole that waged war on the white supremacy built into the fabric of the United States. RAMMELLZEE created his own vocabulary to define the “works of war” he created with his peers. He described much of his work as “Gothic Futurism,” alluding to the ability of both medieval illuminated manuscripts and graffiti writing to abstract, expand, and
recontextualize letters previously thought to have a static and narrow meaning. The term also referenced RAMMELLZEE’s desire to create work that enacted a new kind of future while being made in a time that he believed had regressed in many ways to something archaic (“gothic”) when it came to inequity and control exerted by those in power. As a musician and lyricist in addition to a graffiti writer, RAMMELLZEE—in collaboration with K-Rob, Al Diaz, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—created the foundational ten-minute rap track “Beat Bop” in 1983. He also appeared in Wild Style and Style Wars, two early and influential films about the burgeoning culture of hip-hop and graffiti writing, and he became known for creating rich ensembles from discarded materials found on the street and in the subways. —IK
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983) described himself as a “Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Innovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher.” Born in Wisconsin, the artist spent most of his life working in a bakery and making art during his free hours. Like many self-taught artists, Von Bruenchenhein made use of the materials that were readily available to him. He is known for his twisting towers of poultry bones; unfurling vessels made of pinched clay leaves baked in his coal oven; vibrant paintings on the corrugated cardboard or Masonite he brought home from the bakery, on which pigment is layered and scratched into with combs, bits of paper, brushes made from his wife’s hair, and other tools; and floral pinup photographs of his wife Marie. From 1954 to 1964, Von Bruenchenhein averaged one painting a day, blending his horticultural knowledge with the anxiety brought on by the nuclear age into scenes both apocalyptic and alien. In the 1960s, following his retirement, Von Bruenchenhein began to create ballpoint-pen drawings—crisp monochromatic translations of the same organic scrolling and architectural forms that grace his other works. By the time of his death, Von Bruenchenhein had filled his home with several thousand artworks, which finally gained recognition in the late 1980s after the artist’s friend Daniel Nycz brought them to the attention of the Milwaukee Art Museum. —IK
PL. 114
Untitled, 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
14 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (37.46 x 45 cm)
PL. 115
Untitled, c. 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
11 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (29.84 x 45 cm)
PL. 116
Untitled, c. 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
15 x 18 inches (38 x 45.7 cm)
PL. 117
Untitled, c. 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
12 x 17 3/4 inches (30.48 x 45 cm)
Artist, rapper, and dancer PHASE 2 (1955–2015) was a pioneer of style writing and hip-hop culture in 1970s New York. Born in Manhattan, Michael Lawrence Marrow grew up primarily in the South Bronx, entering the world of “style writing”—painting train cars with an energetic marriage of text and image—in October of 1971 and taking on the name PHASE 2. He is credited with introducing many of the styles that would become staples for fellow writers, complete with his own names for each form: “softies” (bubble letters), “phasemagorical phantasmic” (bubble letters with stars), “squish luscious” (energetic streaked and squished bubble letters), and “bubble cloud” (bubble letters surrounded by clouds) as well as interconnected loops and arrows. By 1975, PHASE 2 transitioned from writing on subway cars to paper and canvas, beginning to create party fliers in a style he dubbed “funky nous deco” that referenced Jack Kirby comics, the work of Romare Bearden, and Art Deco marquees. Engaging in multiple forms of creative expression, he was also a founding member of the b-boy crew New York City Breakers, a rapper, a DJ, and an art director and writer for the magazine IGTimes. —IK
120
DONDI, born Donald Joseph White (1961–1998), was a seminal figure in the graffiti art movement of the 1970s and ’80s long before “street art” entered the mainstream lexicon. Nicknamed “DONDI” in childhood, he grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, where his early fascination with drawing led him to explore graffiti as both an art form and a means of navigating neighborhood boundaries. By the mid-1970s, DONDI had joined the graffiti crew TOP (The Odd Partners), quickly gaining renown for his meticulous technique and distinctive style. His ability to blend soft colors with precise lettering set him apart, making his work instantly recognizable across the boroughs and beyond. DONDI’s artistic evolution mirrored New York’s changing landscape; as downtown galleries began to embrace graffiti in the early 1980s, he emerged as one of the movement's pioneers, showcasing his work in prestigious venues both locally and internationally. Despite graffiti's ephemeral nature, with many pieces lost to time or city cleanup efforts, DONDI's legacy— following his death at the age of thirty-seven from complications related to AIDS—endures through iconic photographs and sketches that captured the essence of his art. —RD
PL. 120
Untitled (Black book), c. 1981
Mixed media
6 x 7 7/8 inches (15.2 x 20 cm)
PL. 121
Untitled (for Duck Rock), c. 1983
Ink on paper
12 1/4 x 17 inches (31.1 x 43.1 cm)
PL. 122
Untitled, 1983
Graphite and ink on paper
7 1/4 x 12 inches (18.4 x 30.5 cm)
PL. 123
Untitled (D-5), 1994
Ink, color pencil, graphite, and collage on paper
19 x 15 inches (48.3 x 38.1 cm)
PL. 124
Untitled (Sketchbook), 1984–86
Mixed media
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches (14 x 21.6 cm)
PL. 125
Untitled (Sketchbook), 1978
Mixed media
9 x 11 inches (22.8 x 27.9 cm)
PL. 126
Untitled (Black book), 1980–81
Mixed media
11 x 16 1/2 inches (27.9 x 16.5 cm)
PL. 127
Untitled (Black book), 1982
Mixed media
11 x 8 3/8 inches (27.9 x 21.2 cm)
PL. 128
Untitled, 1978
Graphite on paper
8 1/2 x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm)
PL. 129
Untitled, n.d.
Mixed media on paper
7 7/8 x 10 3/8 inches (20 x 26.3 cm)
PL. 130
Untitled, n.d. Ink on paper
7 7/8 x 10 1/2 inches (20 x 26.7 cm)
PL. 131
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite and ink on paper
8 1/8 x 10 3/4 inches (20.6 x 27.3 cm)
PL. 132
Untitled, 1981
Mixed media on paper
8 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches (21.6 x 19 cm)
PL. 133
Untitled, 1981
Mixed media on paper
9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches (24.1 x 16.5 cm)
PL. 134
Children of the Grave!, 1985
Watercolor and ink on paper
20 7/8 x 29 5/16 inches (53 x 74.5 cm)
BLADE , a Bronx native born in 1957 as Steven Ogburn, first began graffiti writing on buses and mail trucks in 1971. In 1972, fellow artist Hondo 1 brought BLADE to the Baychester lay-up (an above-ground site where trains are parked) in the Bronx, and he painted his first subway car. Over the next decade or so, BLADE painted over 5,000 train cars, collaborating on his final car with SEEN in 1984. BLADE has been called the King of Trains and the King of Graffiti for his prolific work and his place as a pioneer of New York graffiti culture. His innovative bubble-letter style, continuous reinvention of his own name, bright color palettes, and abstract designs became a source of inspiration for the writers who came after him. Following his final train car piece in the early 1980s, BLADE transitioned into working on paper and canvas. He had his first solo exhibition in Europe in 1981, was included in almost all the early exhibitions on graffiti in the early to mid-1980s, and has since exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. —IK
PL. 135
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite on paper
9 11/16 x 7 5/16 inches (24.6 x 18.6 cm)
PL. 136
In and Out (Train Study), 1980
Graphite on paper
5 15/16 x 8 3/4 inches (15 x 22.2 cm)
PL. 137
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite on paper
4 1/2 x 4 inches (11.4 x 10.2 cm)
PL. 138
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite on paper
8 13/16 x 5 7/8 inches (22.4 x 14.9 cm)
PL. 139
Untitled, 1978
Graphite on paper
5 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches (14.6 x 24.1 cm)
PL. 140
Untitled, 1978
Mixed media on paper
5 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches (14.6 x 24.1 cm)
PL. 141
Untitled, 1978
Graphite and marker on paper
5 13/16 x 9 1/2 inches (14.8 x 24.1 cm)
PL. 142
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite on paper
6 x 10 1/16 inches (15.2 x 25.5 cm)
PL. 143
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite on paper
4 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches (12.4 x 19.7 cm)
PL. 144
Untitled, 1978
Graphite on paper
5 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches (14.6 x 24.1 cm)
PL. 145
Untitled (Black book), 1978
Mixed media
6 x 10 inches (15.2 x 24.5 cm)
PL. 146
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite on paper
6 3/16 x 9 11/16 inches (17.3 x 24.6 cm)
PL. 147
Untitled, n.d.
Graphite and ink on paper, in 2 parts
5 7/8 x 17 3/8 inches (14.9 x 44.1 cm)
A Bronx native, CRASH (1961–) began making his mark in the world of graffiti at the age of thirteen, following older teens to train yards and “bombing” subway cars with tags. Adopting the name “CRASH” after a school computer mishap, his tag—characterized by its vivid colors, intricate designs, and a distinctive blend of cartoon-like imagery and abstract forms—quickly became recognizable across New York City. In 1980, CRASH transitioned from the train yards to the art galleries, curating the pivotal Graffiti Art Success for America at the Bronx gallery Fashion Moda (1980), an exhibition that featured artists such as FUTURA 2000, Fab 5 Freddy, and Lee Quiñones. This landmark show propelled graffiti into the mainstream art world and cemented the then nineteen-yearold CRASH’s pioneering role in the movement. His work quickly gained popularity across Europe, America, and Asia, leading to numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. —RD
Lifelong New Yorker Christopher Ellis (1962–) began tagging subway trains as DAZE starting in 1976 while still a student at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. In the early 1980s, he began a gradual shift from graffiti writing to studio work, creating innovative aerosol paintings on canvas that merged figurative elements with expressive abstract forms. A painting on newsprint, tagged in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, was among his earliest studio works and was first exhibited in the legendary Mudd Club exhibition Beyond Words (1981) curated by FUTURA 2000 and Fab 5 Freddy. This was closely followed by his first solo exhibition at Fashion Moda, an alternative art space located in a South Bronx storefront. DAZE’s early inspirations range from Marvel comics and graphic illustrations by underground comix artist R. Crumb, to work by urban visionary artist Martin Wong and first-generation graffiti pioneers that include BLADE and PHASE 2. DAZE has also created public art projects alongside artists Lee Quiñones and CRASH, including a 1995 design for a train station in Hannover, Germany. DAZE continues to live and work in New York City. —RD
Mike Kelley was a visionary contemporary artist whose work explored a wide range of mediums, including performance, installation, drawing, assemblage, painting, video, photography, sound works, text, and sculpture. Born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan, Kelley grew up as the youngest of four children in a working-class Catholic family. He studied at the University of Michigan and later at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was mentored by the conceptual artist John Baldessari and the experimental filmmaker Tony Oursler. He first gained prominence in the 1980s with provocative and often sardonic pieces that combined high art with elements of punk rock and underground culture. In his series Garbage Drawings, Kelley engaged with themes of societal waste and the overlooked aspects of everyday life by isolating fragments of garbage piles from the American WWII comic series Sad Sack. In 1992, he began teaching at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles for almost forty years until his death in 2012. —RD
Joe Coleman (1955–) is a New York-based painter, writer, and performer whose career spans four decades. He gained early acclaim as a member of the punk band Steel Tips during the 1970s and with his transgressive performance art in the 1980s as well as his work in underground comix, including the graphic novel The Mystery of Woolverine Woo-Bait (1982). His primary focus eventually shifted to his meticulously crafted paintings, created with jeweler’s lenses and a single-hair brush, and often requiring years to complete. Incorporating numerous smaller scenes and symbolic elements within a single work, these macabre portraits explore the grim aspects of human nature and society, delving into themes of violence, mortality, and the grotesque. An avid collector, Coleman has amassed an eclectic collection in his private museum, the Odditorium, which houses sideshow objects, wax figures, crime artifacts, and religious works that explore the darker side of the American psyche. —RD
Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is best known as a Cubist innovator, though his work spans several of the major art movements of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Picasso produced over 20,000 artworks that trace both the political and artistic trajectory of the time, from his early blue period, defined by sullen expressionistic images of poverty and despair; to his Cubist explorations in the early 1910s, fragmenting and reconstituting subjects to compress multiple times and views into one two-dimensional image; to his neoclassical works of the 1920s; to a foray into Surrealism later in the decade; and to visual commentaries as the Spanish Civil War gave way to World War II. Among the themes that appeared throughout Picasso’s career were friends and lovers, musicians, mythological subjects, bulls, fauns, war, and Harlequins like the one included in this presentation. Finding success within the art world during his lifetime, Picasso used the money he earned as an artist in part to amass his own collection of works by other artists. —IK
Jim Nutt (1938–) began his career with a series of exhibitions between 1966 and 1969, alongside the five other members of the midcentury Chicago-based exhibition group the Hairy Who: Jim Falconer, Art Green, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum, and Gladys Nilsson, who married Nutt in 1961. Initially, however, Nutt had studied architecture at Washington University of St. Louis, where a figure drawing class sparked his interest in drawing and painting. Moving to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nutt graduated in 1965, joining a small group of like-minded artists known for their colorful, graphic figurative works inspired by comics as much as by fine art. Nutt’s paintings, drawings, and prints are linear, geometric images of figures in rude, slapstick, or surreal situations, while others are portraits of flattened, stylized faces gazing out at the viewer. In some of his works he reverse paints on Plexiglas or builds custom frames to contextualize the work; in others he allows fine pencil lines and delicate shading on paper to define his singular characters. Nutt still lives and works in Chicago. —IK
PL. 163
Boop, c. 1968–69
Acrylic on acrylic in artist’s frame
18 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/8 inches (47 x 36.8 x 2.9 cm)
PL. 164
Drawing for Pug, 1990
Pencil on gray laid paper
12 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches (32.4 x 32.4 cm)
PL. 165
Twixt, 1996
Graphite on paper
17 x 11 1/4 inches (43.2 x 28.6 cm)
PL. 166
Is this the right way?, 1979
Graphite and color pencil on paper
11 x 13 inches (27.9 x 33 cm)
PL. 167
Really!? (thump thump), 1986
Color pencil on paper
14 x 16 inches (35.6 x 40.6 cm)
PL. 168 an absolute, 1983
Color pencil on paper
9 15/16 x 17 1/4 inches (25.2 x 43.8 cm)
PL. 169
Quick Twittle Twittle, 1978
Color pencil on paper
10 3/4 x 9 1/8 inches (27.3 x 23.2 cm)
Julie Curtiss (1982–) is a mixedmedia artist whose paintings, sculptures, and works on paper explore the interplay between nature and culture through reimagined female archetypes. Using Surrealist stratagems of picture-making, including close-cropped compositions and exaggerated, cartoon-like forms, Curtiss mines her subjects from everyday life to create drawings that are at once fantastical, precise, and cinematic. Central to her work is the fragmented female body, depicted through symbols of stereotyped femininity—such as long nails or high heels—deployed in an exploration of identity, perception, and the hidden complexities of human experience. Influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting, the Chicago Imagists, pop imagery, and Japanese comics and manga, Curtiss’s work is marked by a vivid color palette and a grotesque sense of the uncanny. Born and raised in Paris, France, she studied at the École des BeauxArts. After graduating, Curtiss moved to Japan for a year, then relocated to Brooklyn, where she worked in the studios of Jeff Koons and KAWS. —RD
Like her fellow Chicago Imagists, Gladys Nilsson (1940–) creates distorted, graphic figurative artwork defined by confident lines and liberal use of color, and rooted in both modernism and comics. Nilsson, along with husband Jim Nutt, was part of the group known as the Hairy Who, formed in 1965 as a means for all its members, newly graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to draw more attention to their work. Nilsson, who grew up in Chicago, visited the Art Institute of Chicago as a child, before attending the school in the early 1960s and eventually returning as a professor for over twenty-five years. While Nilsson has traditionally rendered scenes in pencil and watercolor—or on Plexiglas, also popular with other members of the Hairy Who— she has also increasingly introduced collage into her body of work, yeilding more opportunity to play with scale and distortions of her characters and their surroundings. —IK
One of six artists who made up the Chicago-based exhibition group the Hairy Who, Karl Wirsum (1939–2021) created vibrant figurative work in a bold graphic style. Initially interested in becoming a cartoonist, Wirsum attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), graduating in 1961 as a fine artist. Wirsum and fellow SAIC students formed the Hairy Who in order to collectively increase the impact of their work, recognizing commonalities among their colorful compositions populated by exaggerated bodies and assertive line work. Wirsum’s art maintained some of his earlier comic influences but also made reference to Surrealism, Dadaism, Japanese woodblock prints, ancient Mesoamerican art, Paul Klee, Matisse, and SAIC instructor Ray Yoshida. In colors ranging from neon to primary, sometimes blocked or inscribed on a black background, Wirsum created frontfacing figures vibrating with energy. Among his subjects are musicians like those he encountered growing up on the South Side of Chicago, robotic and alien humanoids, demons, and creatures with segmented and contorted bodies. Wirsum first exhibited in 1966 with the Hairy Who and held his first solo exhibition a year later at Marjorie Dell Gallery, also in Chicago. —IK
Growing up in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, Larissa De Jesús Negrón (1994–) watched her aunt draw from an early age. Inspired by this and by the prints of Salvador Dalí works that her father kept around the home, De Jesús Negrón began art classes at nine years old. Now living and working in Queens, New York, she creates works that express a nostalgia for home, an interest in Surrealism, and the play of interiority and exteriority that defines her life in the city. De Jesús Negrón’s work has been described as Neo-Surrealism, taking cues from René Margritte, David Salle, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, and Salvador Dalí in creating introspective images using a blend of airbrush and oil painting. Objects of mundanity are common in her work: bathroom furniture, frames, and windows serve as portals into different realities. Water, including tears, is also a constant, acting as a surface for literal and figurative reflection. —IK
Born in Atlantic City in 1978, Julia Chiang studied studio art and art history at New York University, graduating in 2000. Originally drawn to the tactile nature of ceramics, Chiang began painting around 2011, first experimenting with watercolor and gouache on paper. Even as the artist moved from three to two dimensions, her interest in the material nature of her work remained. Her large, vibrant canvases are consumed by repeated forms, each with minute variation that reveals the nature of the paint and makes the composition breathe like an organism. In some works, Chiang includes enigmatic phrases— fragments of letter sign-offs and platitudes made up of the same leaf and teardrop shapes or spelled with slowly melting Ring Pops nailed directly to the wall. Chiang lives and works in Brooklyn. —IK
Ana Benaroya (1986–) is a New York City-born, Jersey City-based artist known for her dynamic and provocative works that challenge conventional notions of femininity and desire. Her robust, muscular female figures defy traditional gender expectations and highlight a unique female gaze, portraying women in powerful, assertive roles. These figures, adorned with exaggerated musculature and striking, offbeat colors, explore themes of female desire and queer sensibility. Benaroya draws inspiration from various sources, including the graphic styles of superhero comics and artists like Peter Saul. As Benaroya has articulated, her aim is to create passionate depictions of female nudes from her own perspective, contributing to a richer, more inclusive visual language in contemporary art. Benaroya holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2008) and an MFA in Painting from Yale University (2019). —RD
PL. 176
Til Dawn, 2020
Marker and ink on Arches paper in artist’s frame
15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 cm)
PL. 177
In A Whirlpool, I’m Loving You, 2021 India ink and marker on two sheets of cut paper
14 x 22 inches (35.56 x 55.88 cm)
PL. 178
From Dusk, 2020
Marker and ink on Arches paper in artist’s frame
15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 cm)
David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) used his wide-ranging artistic tool kit—drawing, music, painting, film, collage, photography, spray paint and stencils, and writing—to express affection, rage, desire, and sharp observations about the injustices of the world. During the first decade of his life, spent with his abusive father in suburban Michigan, Wojnarowicz retreated to the woods to play with the critters—snakes, bugs, and frogs—that would later recur in his work. In the mid-1960s, when the artist and his siblings moved to their mother’s home in New York, where they were largely unsupervised, he wandered through downtown Manhattan, engaging in sex work while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. Soon after he turned seventeen, he was living on the street and in a halfway house. Wojnarowicz met photographer Peter Hujar in 1980, forming a bond with his fellow artist that would result in a brief affair and a much longer companionship, collaboration, and mentorship. With encouragement from Hujar, Wojnarowicz began
to place more emphasis on his visual art, embracing the drawings and paintings he had begun making alongside his writing. Common motifs in Wojnarowicz’s work include ants swarming like warmongering bands of people; solitary and vulnerable frogs; the number twenty-three, a reference to the average number of chromosomal pairs found in humans; downtown New York and its denizens; cruel quotes from politicians who refused to recognize the crisis of AIDS and the humanity of the queer community; cowboys and buffalo; fires and explosions; maps; and sexual imagery. As the 1980s continued Wojnarowicz became a regular at East Village galleries, and in 1985 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. Following Peter Hujar’s death from AIDS related complications in 1987 and his own diagnosis not long after, Wojnarowicz—already accustomed to laying bare the hatred and cruelty towards difference structured into society and law—began to create somber works that meditated on death. —IK
George Condo’s (1957–) works are populated by figures who range from grotesque, often built from fragmented and repeated body parts, to cartoonish. These imaginary portraits channel the artist’s longstanding interest in art history into what he calls “artificial realism,” a kind of reconstruction of abstraction into realism. Condo began drawing at an early age, progressing from YMCA art classes as a child in New Hampshire to music theory and art history studies at the University of Massachusetts. After graduating from college in the late 1970s, Condo briefly moved to Boston, where he played in a punk band, and in December of 1979 he moved to New York City, encouraged by fellow artist JeanMichel Basquiat and the flourishing downtown art scene. While in New York, Condo painted for Andy Warhol in the Factory and made his own work as well. His first solo exhibition was held in 1983 at Ulrike Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles, and Condo has shown his work extensively in the United States and abroad since—including at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and in retrospectives at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.; Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark; the New Museum in New York; and the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, Austria. Condo moved to Paris in 1985 and remained there for a decade before returning to New York, where he lives and works today. —RD
A groundbreaking figure in Abstract Expressionism, Willem de Kooning was born in 1904 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, into a workingclass family. His early talent for art led him to an apprenticeship with a design firm and night school at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In 1926, de Kooning immigrated to the United States. Settling in New York City in 1927, he quickly became involved in the art world, befriending notable artists like Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky. During the Great Depression, de Kooning worked for the Works Progress Administration, which solidified his commitment to painting. By the late 1940s, he and contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko became central figures in the Abstract Expressionist movement. His 1948 solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery marked his rise to prominence. De Kooning constantly explored new styles, refusing to adhere to a single artistic approach. In the 1970s, he began to experiment with sculpture, creating Clamdigger—for which this charcoal drawing serves as a preparatory sketch—in 1972. Inspired by shellfish diggers in Montauk, Long Island, this drawing brims with rapid, energetic marks and expressionistic whorls, highlighting de Kooning’s unique commitment to both abstraction and figuration. De Kooning completed his final painting in 1991 and passed away in 1997. —RD
Born Lenore Knaster in Newark, New Jersey, Lee Lozano (1930–1999) was an influential yet elusive figure whose legacy is marked by radical individualism and acts of refusal. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in the early 1960s. There she embarked on a decadelong career, producing drawings, paintings, and conceptual pieces. Her early work, characterized by a robust and often provocative cartoon style, tackled themes of sexual and artistic decorum with exaggerated images of tools and distorted body close-ups. Despite being recognized by critic Lucy Lippard in 1995 as a leading female conceptual artist of the time, Lozano departed entirely from the New York art scene by the early 1970s. Her conceptual works often intersected with her life—most notably in her 1969 General Strike Piece, in which she documented her gradual withdrawal from the art world. She also initiated a controversial boycott of women, which, although intended as a temporary project, lasted the rest of her life. After leaving New York, Lozano moved to Dallas, Texas, continuing her art in self-imposed isolation until her death in 1999.
—RD
PL. 182 No title, 1962
Crayon and graphite on paper
22 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (57.2 x 43.2 cm)
PL. 183 No title, 1962
Crayon on paper
13 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches (35 x 42.5 cm)
PL. 184 No title, 1959
Charcoal on paper mounted on board
25 x 18 7/8 inches (63.5 x 48.6 cm)
PL. 185 No title, 1959
Charcoal on paper
24 3/4 x 18 7/8 inches (62.9 x 47.9 cm)
PL. 186
No title, n.d.
Graphite and crayon on paper
9 x 9 1/2 inches (23 x 24 cm)
Born in 1931 in New York City, Martha Edelheit studied at NYU, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago, eventually joining the avant-garde artists of 1950s and ’60s New York. Traveling in the circles that frequented Reuben Gallery and Judson Gallery, Edelheit engaged with Happenings, experimental object making, and painting that challenged the confines of more traditional form and subject matter. Breaking the frame in some paintings, Edelheit also painted and drew nude men and women with a scale, boldness, and frankness that secured her place among feminist artists of the era. Edelheit’s nudes served as a counterpoint to a history of nude painting dominated by male visions of women’s bodies. Edelheit began to explore the imagery of tattoos in 1962 as an extra layer of expression atop her nude bodies. In 1993, Edelheit moved to Svartsjö, outside of Stockholm, where she lived and worked for thirty years before returning part-time to New York. —IK
Aurel Schmidt (1982–) grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia, moving to New York City in 2005, where she has lived and worked since. Schmidt first showed her work in the tinyvices.com exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in March of 2006. Following the successful sale of three of her works in that presentation, Schmidt decided to pursue art full-time. In 2010, her work Master of the Universe: FlexMaster 3000 —featuring a minotaur intricately drawn as an amalgamation of cigarettes, fur, stars, roses, bananas, and a six pack of beer for a six pack—was included in the Whitney Biennial. Schmidt’s drawings can take 100 hours or more to complete. Much of Schmidt’s work features discarded and decaying matter, which she draws with incredible detail to create figures that combine the exterior world of nature and litter with the physical and emotional interior of the body to reflect on life, decay, and death. —IK
As a child in Los Angeles, H.C. Westermann (1922–1981) learned how to craft his own wooden toys. When the United States entered World War II, Westermann, then in his early twenties, joined the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a marine gunner in the Pacific. The wrecked ships and deadly conflicts that Westermann experienced during the war would become recurring images in his work. After the war—and a brief stint as an acrobat touring military bases— Westermann enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, initially studying applied arts. In 1951, he reenlisted in the Marines and witnessed the carnage of the Korean War. When he returned to Chicago he enrolled in SAIC as a fine arts student with the help of the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1954. Westermann’s drawings are populated by “death ships,” skeletal figures, solemn and solitary buildings, characters at the brink of death, expanses of foreboding desert and ocean, and carrion creatures lurking in the corners. His sculptures are wooden vessels— among them robotic humanoids and buildings—supplemented by sheet metal, carpet, glass, and bronze. Westermann’s first solo exhibition was held in 1958 at Allan Frumkin Gallery, and his work has since been the subject of five retrospectives: at LACMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Fondazione Prada, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. —IK
PL. 190 The Sea of Cortez: High Swan Dive, 1973 Ink and watercolor on paper 30 x 22 1/4
PL.
PL. 192 The Black Ship, 1970 Ink and watercolor on paper
x 22 1/2 inches (50.8 x 57.2 cm)
PL. 193
Untitled (Hunchback), 1973 Ink and watercolor on paper 11 1/4 x 14 inches (28.6 x 35.6 cm)
PL. 194 An Affair in the Islands, 1972 Ink and watercolor on paper 22 1/4 x 29 3/4 inches (56.5 x 75.6 cm)
PL. 195 Desert Scene, 1964 Ink and wash on paper 10 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (27.3 x 34.9 cm)
PL. 196
Central America, 1973 Ink and watercolor on paper 10 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches (26.7 x 34.3 cm)
PL. 197 In the Desert, 1977 Ink and watercolor on paper 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 61 cm)
PL. 198 A Lady in Paradise, 1977 Ink and watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm)
PL. 199
Drawing of a Man Underwater, Sea of Cortez, 1974 Ink and watercolor on paper
11 x 15 inches (27.9 x 38.1 cm)
PL. 200
Untitled (Rose), 1963 Ink and watercolor on paper
12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm)
A prominent figure in Bay Area figuration, Judith Linhares (1940–) emerged amongst a panoply of artistic traditions in the 1960s and ’70s that included California assemblage and outsider art, the Chicago-based Hairy Who group, and Mexican ritual objects. Born in Pasadena and trained at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she earned both her BFA and MFA, Linhares cultivated a unique artistic voice intertwined with feminist principles. Initially exploring abstraction, Linhares transitioned to figurative painting, gaining prominence with her participation in the influential Bad Painting show curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1978. Influenced by the turbulent sociopolitical climate of the ’70s, her pieces from the Love Letters from San Jose series, inspired by the Mexican political printmaker José Guadelupe Posada, depict skeletal figures engaged in hauntingly surreal yet mundane activities. In 1980, Linhares relocated to New York, where she continues to explore themes of female resilience, human nature, and the subconscious. —RD
PL. 201
Love Letters from San Jose, 1972 Ink on paper
29 x 23 inches (73.6 x 58.4 cm)
PL. 202
At Home in San Jose II, 1972 Ink on paper 29 x 23 inches (73.7 x 58.4 cm)
PL. 203
At Home in San Jose, 1972 Ink on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.4 x 73.6 cm)
PL. 204
Love Letters from San Jose, 1971 Ink on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.4 x 73.3 cm)
PL. 205 Lovers, 1972 Ink on paper
29 x 23 inches (73.3 x 58.4 cm)
Brooklyn-based artist Nicole Eisenman (1965–) is renowned for her innovative approach across multiple artistic mediums, including painting, printmaking, collage, and sculpture. Born in France to a German-Jewish family, Eisenman’s early exposure to diverse cultures and artistic influences set the stage for her unconventional artistic journey. Emerging during the resurgence of figurative painting in the 1990s, Eisenman quickly distinguished herself amidst a backdrop of irony and eclecticism. Influenced by the irreverent spirit of late-period Francis Picabia, she embraced a style that blends classical techniques with incisive social commentary. Central to Eisenman's artistic vision is subversion—challenging established norms and taboos with dark humor. Her early works often parodied Old Masters, magazine advertisements, and cartoons, injecting them with her own brand of wit and critique. Eisenman is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Her work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, 2019 Whitney Biennial, and 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster in Germany. —RD
Born in Philadelphia in 1943, R. Crumb is a pioneering American cartoonist and social satirist who emerged as a leading figure in the underground comix movement of the 1960s. Characterized by a raw, sardonic edge, his comics often explore themes of American culture, sexuality, and social issues with an unflinching honesty. Crumb’s early work gained prominence with the 1968 publication of Zap Comix, which featured iconic characters such as the lascivious Fritz the Cat and philosophical Mr. Natural. Marked by their subversive humor and candid exploration of taboo subjects, these creations challenged mainstream sensibilities and established Crumb as a countercultural icon. In addition to his comix, Crumb’s distinctive artistic style—featuring meticulous cross-hatching and exaggerated, grotesque figures—has graced album covers, including the famous image for Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills. His autobiographical series, Weirdo, further cemented his reputation as a keen observer of human nature. In 1991, Crumb relocated from San Francisco to the south of France, where he continues to live and work. —RD
Aline Kominsky-Crumb (1948–2022) was the first woman in the underground comix movement to create autobiographical stories. Her ink alter ego, The Bunch, confronts the darkly humorous realities of life, death, work, sex, and aging, reflecting Kominsky-Crumb’s own experiences. Born in New York, Kominsky-Crumb grew up on Long Island. Her interest in art eventually found her university hopping from SUNY New Paltz to Cooper Union and then the University of Arizona, where she earned her BFA in painting. Dissatisfied with the narrow formality of her painting education, Kominsky-Crumb moved to San Francisco in 1970, spurred by an interest in Zap Comix and the irreverent work of contemporaries like Justin Green. Her influential autobiographical comic Goldie: A Neurotic Woman was published in 1972 in Wimmen’s Comix, followed in subsequent decades by group and solo publications including Love That Bunch, Twisted Sisters, Dirty Laundry, and Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir. Kominsky-Crumb also collaborated with and brought attention to fellow artists, especially women in comics, and served as editor for R. Crumb’s anthology series Weirdo for seven years. —IK
PL. 207
Promethean Enterprises #3, 1971 Ink and graphite on paper
10 3/4 x 8 inches (27.3 x 20.3 cm)
PL. 208
The Moonlight March (Sketchbook), 1964 Ink on paper
7 7/8 x 5 1/8 inches (20 x 13 cm)
PL. 209
Mr. Natural....Don’t Fuck With Him, 2002 Ink and correction fluid on paper 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
PL. 210 Untitled, 2015 Ink and correction fluid on paper
12 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches (32.1 x 24.4 cm)
PL. 211 Dragster, 1966 Ink on paper
14 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (36.5 x 45.1 cm)
PL. 212 Untitled, c. 1964 Ink on paper
5 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches (13.3 x 21 cm)
PL. 213
Weirdo #23, 1988
Ink and correction fluid on Bristol board 15 1/4 x 12 inches (38.7 x 30.5 cm)
PL. 214
I Can’t..Seem...To…, 1964–65 Ink on paper
11 x 7 1/2 inches (27.9 x 19.1 cm)
PL. 215 ID #1, 1990 Ink and correction fluid on Bristol board 13 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (34.3 x 24.1 cm)
PL. 216
Verre d'Eau (Cover of Weirdo #28), 1993 Ink and correction fluid on paper
17 x 13 3/4 inches (43.2 x 34.9 cm)
PL. 217
Mr. Natural Takes a Vacation, c. 1960s–70s Ink on paper
Four parts, each measuring 13 x 9 inches (33 x 22.9 cm)
PL. 218
Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb Aline & Bob in The Aline Documentary, 2017 Ink on paper
Two parts, each measuring 16 x 11 5/8 inches (40.6 x 29.5 cm)
PL. 219
Sketchbook, 1979–81 Ink, correction fluid, graphite, collage, and tape on paper
12 3/8 x 10 1/4 x 3/4 inches (31.4 x 26 x 1.9 cm)
PL. 220
American Splendor Assaults the Media, 1983 Ink, correction fluid, and collage on paper
Four parts, each measuring 16 7/8 x 13 7/8 inches (42.9 x 35.2 cm)
Raymond Pettibon (1957–) developed his artistic language while part of the West Coast punk scene during the 1980s. Within a community of likeminded artists and musicians who became the audience for—and sometimes collaborators on—zines, advertisements, and LP covers for bands like Sonic Youth and Black Flag, Pettibon began to create pensive yet irreverent compositions that combined politics, cartoons, literature, and popular culture. Pettibon’s drawings, which favor a cross-hatched ink style reminiscent of golden age comics and incorporate text pulled from a variety of sources, provide a satiric take on current events, expanding on the tradition of political cartooning and drawing inspiration from Francisco Goya, Thomas Rowlandson, and Honoré Daumier. In the mid-1980s, Pettibon gained the attention of fellow artists including Ed Ruscha and Mike Kelley, and subsequently Los Angeles-based art galleries. Since, he has shown his work at institutions around the world, including a major survey that was presented at The Drawing Center in 1998 and another at The New Museum in 2017. —IK
Born in Los Angeles, Rick Griffin (1944–1991) was inspired as a teenager by cartoons, Disney animations, and rebellious and unconventional comics like Mad and Tales from the Crypt. Moving to the Palos Verdes peninsula in 1958, he immersed himself in surf culture, doodling cartoon surfers and earning recognition for a blonde-haired character named Murphy, who became a staple in Surfer magazine. In 1963, Griffin moved to San Francisco and became a prominent figure in the psychedelic art movement. His iconic poster designs, including the famous “flying eyeball” poster for Jimi Hendrix, and album covers for bands like the Grateful Dead showcased his innovative use of color and unique lettering style, which combined elements of Wild West typography with psychedelic flourishes. The origin of the eyeball motif can be traced back to a nearfatal car accident in 1963, when Griffin severely injured his eye. As a result of this traumatic event, the eye became a lifelong emblem for Griffin’s artistic identity, appearing in various forms as a symbol for awareness, perception, and altered states of consciousness. Griffin’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident in 1991 marked the end of a prolific career. —RD
Martin Wong (1946–1999) was raised in San Francisco, where he later began his career as a ceramicist, studying the medium in 1968 at Humboldt University and first showing his work in 1970 at the de Young Museum. Wong quickly pivoted to painting, spending the early years of his career, which he called the “Eureka years” in California, including the city of Eureka, where he depicted the everyday shops and buildings slowly being consumed by gentrification. After almost eight years as a painter in California, making posters and sets for the Cockettes and the Angels of Light—San Francisco-based queer guerrilla theater troops—Wong moved to New York in 1978. He became a part of the downtown art scene, befriending and collecting the work of artists in the burgeoning
graffiti scene. Wong’s paintings include tightly shaded renderings of the bricks and tenements of the Lower East Side as well as the graffiti writers he befriended, chain link fences, and city prisons. Wong immersed himself in the Nuyorican poet and artist community on the LES, falling in love with poet, actor, and cofounder of the Nuyorican Poets Café Miguel Piñero. As the 1990s approached, Wong’s work took on a greater sense of loss, the shops that he translated from his neighborhood to the page now shown shuttered in the face of increased gentrification. By the mid-1990s Wong moved back to San Francisco, where he spent the last few years of his life, passing away from medical complications due to AIDS in 1999. —IK
PL. 225
Untitled (Original cover artwork for “Footprints
Poems + Leaves”), 1968
Graphite on paper
8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches (21.59 x 13.97 cm)
PL. 226
Cockettes, c. 1971
Ink on paper
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
PL. 227
Randy Starr - Professional Daredevil + Death
Rider, c. 1970
Ink on paper
17 5/8 x 12 inches (44.8 x 30.5 cm)
William A. Hall is a self-taught artist whose life and work reflect resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Hall took basic art classes during elementary school and harbored a lifelong ambition to be an artist (his grandfather was a commercial artist based in New York). He lived with his mother until her passing in 1997, after which he experienced a period of homelessness that lasted nearly two decades. During this time, Hall transformed the old cars in which he lived into mobile studios, spending up to twelve hours a day drawing with his steering wheel as an easel. Using color pencils and crayons, Hall created a substantial suite of drawings depicting themes of safety, optimism, and survival. His artworks are notable for their intricate fusion of phantasmagorical environments, retro-futuristic vehicles, inventive typography, and imaginative architectural forms.
—RD
California Cities Rediscover Their Own Natural Resources, c. 2010–12
Pencil and crayon on paper
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.5 cm)
Franchised Prototype Communities
Functionalize a Healthier World, 2012
Pencil and crayon on paper
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.5 cm)
America’s California Aptitude of Survival, c. 2010–12
14 x 11 inches (35.5 x 27.9 cm)
Mom and Pop Shops Logo, n.d.
Pencil and crayon on paper
14 x 11 inches (35.5 x 27.9 cm)
Born in 1889 in Přívoz, Czech Republic, into a Czech Roman Catholic family, Josef Kotzian (Kocián) was an Ostravian designer and machinist who became pivotal in the Silesian spiritualist movement of the early twentieth century. Initially trained as a mining official, Kotzian’s life took a transformative turn following personal tragedy. After marrying and subsequently losing his wife early in life, Kotzian immersed himself in the organized spiritualist community of Radvanice, Silesia, where he found solace and purpose. Adept in media drawing, Kotzian’s artworks, signed under the pseudonym Solferino, became renowned for their intricate detail and symbolic richness. His drawings, characterized by astral plants and ornamental motifs, served not only as expressions of spiritual insight but also as therapeutic tools as he battled lung disease. Throughout his life, Kotzian played a pivotal role in the Spiritist Association of the Brotherhood, serving as vice chairman and contributing significantly to the movement's intellectual and cultural activities. Despite the Communist ban on spiritualism in Czechoslovakia from 1951 onwards, Kotzian clandestinely continued his artistic practice, distributing his drawings among close friends within the spiritualist circle until his death in 1964. —RD
Since emerging in the early 2000s after receiving her MFA from Columbia University, American painter and sculptor Dana Schutz (1976–) has become known for her thickly painted, vivid characters and enigmatic visual narratives. In 2001, Schutz began a series of paintings of figures violently sneezing. Her work, which incorporates distorted subjects with stretching, streaking, ballooning, and swirling faces, quickly gained a following. Schutz had her first solo exhibition, Frank from Observation, in 2002, and in 2003 her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Since, Schutz has painted figures in imagined, allegorical scenes or engaged in impossible tasks, including people cannibalizing themselves, mountains of figures balanced precariously above oceans or reaching for the sky, and wide-eyed characters staring out of the canvas. —IK
Born in Tokyo in 1969, Tomoo Gokita began his career as a graphic designer and illustrator before shifting to fine art in his late twenties, tired of painting and drawing the subjects that clients dictated to him. In the 1990s he gained attention for his black-and-white charcoal and ink drawings, first as a cult figure in the Japanese art world and then internationally. His works take inspiration from vintage photographs, pictures of Western celebrities who have fallen out of the public eye, comics, wrestling, and Playboy magazine. In his drawings Gokita renders his figures with the strong lighting and smooth shading of the photographs he references, while he also distorts his subjects by pushing their features into eerily blank or grotesque and then further to abstraction. In this way, Gokita creates psychologically charged, uncanny visions of culture. —IK
PL. 237
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (28.1 x 21 cm)
PL. 238
Untitled, 2011
Ink on paper
11 x 8 inches (27.9 x 20.3 cm)
PL. 239
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
5 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches (14.8 x 10 cm)
PL. 240
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
7 7/16 x 4 5/8 inches (18.9 x 11.7 cm)
PL. 241
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm)
PL. 242
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
5 15/16 x 3 1/2 inches (15.1 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 243
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm)
PL. 244
Untitled, 2012
Graphite on paper
4 5/8 x 3 9/16 inches (11.7 x 9 cm)
PL. 245
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 1/16 x 8 1/4 inches (28.1 x 21 cm)
PL. 246
Untitled, 2012
Graphite on paper
6 1/4 x 4 15/16 inches (15.9 x 12.5 cm)
PL. 247
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm)
PL. 248
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
5 x 3 1/2 inches (12.7 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 249
Untitled, 2011
Graphite and ink on paper
6 7/8 x 5 inches (17.5 x 12.7 cm)
PL. 250
Summer Holiday, 2010
Graphite on paper
8 1/2 x 6 5/16 inches (21.5 x 16 cm)
PL. 251
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper 11 x 8 1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm)
PL. 252
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
4 3/4 x 3 9/16 inches (12.1 x 9 cm)
PL. 253
Untitled, 2011
Ink on paper
6 3/16 x 5 inches (15.7 x 12.7 cm)
PL. 254
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
4 15/16 x 3 1/2 inches (12.5 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 255
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm)
PL. 256
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
2 3/4 x 3 3/8 inches (7 x 8.6 cm)
PL. 257
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
5 x 6 inches (12.7 x 15.2 cm)
PL. 258
Untitled, 2011 Ink on paper
9 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches (25.2 x 20 cm)
PL. 259
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
4 3/4 x 3 1/2 inches (12.1 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 260
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 1/16 x 8 1/4 inches (28.1 x 21 cm)
PL. 261
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
5 x 4 1/4 inches (12.7 x 10.8 cm)
PL. 262
Untitled, 2012
Graphite on paper
2 3/4 x 2 1/8 inches (7 x 5.4 cm)
PL. 263
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
6 1/8 x 5 inches (15.7 x 12.7 cm)
PL. 264
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
7 3/4 x 5 7/8 inches (19.7 x 14.8 cm)
PL. 265
Untitled, 2010
Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/8 inches (27.9 x 20.8 cm)
PL. 266
Candle, 2010
Graphite on paper
8 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches (20.7 x 20.7 cm)
PL. 267
Untitled, 2011
Ink on paper
6 1/4 x 5 inches (15.9 x 12.7 cm)
PL. 268
Untitled, 2011
Graphite on paper
5 x 4 1/4 inches (12.7 x 10.8 cm)
PL. 269
Untitled, 2011 Graphite on paper
9 3/8 x 7 1/4 inches (23.8 x 18.4 cm)
PL. 270
Untitled, 2011 Graphite on paper
4 15/16 x 3 1/2 inches (12.5 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 271
Bearded Man, 2010 Graphite on paper
8 x 6 1/8 inches (20.3 x 15.7 cm)
PL. 272
Untitled, 2012 Graphite on paper
4 5/8 x 3 1/2 inches (11.7 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 273
Untitled, 2010 Graphite on paper
11 1/16 x 8 1/4 inches (28.1 x 21 cm)
PL. 274
Untitled, 2011 Graphite on paper
7 9/16 x 5 3/4 inches (19.2 x 14.6 cm)
PL. 275
Untitled, 2011 Graphite on paper
6 1/4 x 5 inches (15.9 x 12.7 cm)
PL. 276
Untitled, 2010 Ink on paper
11 1/16 x 8 1/4 inches (28.1 x 21 cm)
PL. 277
Untitled, 2011 Graphite on paper
3 15/16 x 3 1/2 inches (10 x 8.9 cm)
PL. 278
Untitled, 2010 Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (28 x 29.5 cm)
PL. 279
Untitled, 2010 Graphite on paper
11 x 8 1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm)
PL. 280
Untitled, 2011 Graphite on paper
6 1/4 x 4 3/8 inches (15.9 x 11.1 cm)
PL. 281
Untitled, 2012 Graphite on paper
7 5/8 x 6 7/8 inches (19.5 x 17.3 cm)
Simone Johnson (1971–) is known for her vibrant Prismacolor pencil drawings in which she captures whimsical, thematic scenes of New York City’s bodega cats amongst shelves stacked with brilliantly colored boxes, canned goods, and deli products. A part-time gallery assistant and working artist at Pure Vision Arts (PVA)—a New York City-based nonprofit that provides creative resources to people with autism and neurodivergent disabilities—Johnson’s inspiration for this ongoing series began after observing a bodega cat lounging on a freezer above a sign that read: “Please do not touch the cat.” Johnson is also a writer and dancer who has been featured in the New York Daily News. She has exhibited widely, including at the Outsider Art Fair, New York Transit Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum. Johnson was born in Manhattan and currently resides in Staten Island.
—RD
Born in Clerkenwell, London, in 1860, Louis Wain is best known for his drawings of cats performing scenes from Victorian and Edwardian life. While Wain initially began his illustration career in journalism, he had a particular skill for rendering animals and the natural world and began contributing to popular science journals in addition to news outlets. This skill for drawing animals led to Wain’s collaboration with writer Caroline Hughes, known by the pen name Kari, on the children’s book Madame Tabby’s Establishment in 1886. The same year he contributed eleven drawings featuring over 150 festive cats to the Christmas issue of Illustrated London News. Wain’s drawings of cats became incredibly popular during his lifetime, finding their way onto greeting cards, prints, books, and magazines, though he never found significant financial success due to poor business sense. The money he did make went to supporting his mother and five younger sisters. Wain married his sisters’ governess, Emily Richardson, in 1883, and the couple adopted a cat named Peter, who featured in some of his drawings. Richardson died of breast cancer in 1887, and in the following years Wain displayed violent and erratic behavior that eventually led to his admission to Springfield Hospital in 1924. A testament to the popularity of his work was that in 1925 Wain was transferred to Bethlem Hospital at the request of British Prime Minister Ramsey Macdonald. Wain died in 1939 at Napsbury Hospital, where he had resided for nine years, drawing until the end of his life. —IK
Nicole Appel (1990–) is a self-taught artist whose detailed color pencil drawings act as non-traditional forms of portraiture that reflect her deep connection to the world and those around her. In 2016, Appel joined LAND Studio and Gallery, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit habilitation program for neurodivergent adult artists. Diagnosed with autism at age two, her artistic talent blossomed at an early age, fueled by her savant-like memory. Appel’s highly saturated, dynamic compositions—each drawn from memory—pay homage to important individuals in her life.
—RD
PL. 292
Parrots and Pysanky (Homage to Roz Chast), 2020
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 293
Painting and Poker, 2022
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 294
Harry Potter and Medieval Magic, 2019
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 295
Dancers and Dogs, 2019
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 296
Japanese Matchbook Covers and Craft Beers, 2021
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 297
Pakistani Truck Art (Homage to Jerry Saltz), 2020
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 298
Cats and Kids, 2022
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 299
Cuba, 2018
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 300
Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, 2021
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
PL. 301
Tattoos, Burlesque, and Roller Derby Girls (Homage to Danny D from American Pickers, aka
Danny Diesel/Danielle Colby), 2020
Color pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
Born in 1969 to artist parents, Todd James —also known by his moniker REAS—is an artist who got his start as a graffiti writer, earning recognition as a seventeen-year-old tagging the streets and trains of New York City. Inspired by cartoons such as Ralph Bakshi's Spiderman, Japanese-style cinema like Godzilla and Gamera, as well as midcentury abstraction, James’s early street works blend a unique approach to typography with comical imagery and fantastical storytelling. After years as a self-taught street artist, James expanded his visual output into the gallery and commercial sphere, collaborating with prominent figures in the entertainment industry like Eminem, the Beastie Boys, and Kid Rock to create iconic album covers and emblems; illustrating for Cartoon Network; and designing puppets for the TV show Crank Yankers on Comedy Central. Often infused with profane humor and satire, James’s mature paintings and drawings explore themes of consumerism, celebrity, and the absurdities of modern life. James continues to live and work in New York City. —RD
Over the course of a six-decadelong career Peter Saul (1934–) has created paintings and drawings that present American culture, violence, and grotesque visions of humanity with vibrant color. Developing his signature style in the 1960s, Saul rejected the rise of Abstract Expressionism and was lumped somewhat awkwardly with Pop Art. His compositions of distorted bodies, icons like Superman and Mickey Mouse, everyday objects, and graffiti-like layering could not be so easily categorized. His remixed realities draw inspiration from artists (Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, and Francis Bacon) and popular culture, including the gruesome 1940s true crime comic Crime Does Not Pay and Mad magazine comics. Saul’s early interest in modern art combined
with an adolescence spent in a violently strict boarding school fed into his dual desires to be an artist and to question authority. This took him from California School of Fine Arts and Washington University School of Fine Arts to an eight year period living in London, Paris, the Netherlands, and Rome in the late 1950s and early ’60s. During this era, Saul regularly exhibited internationally as well as in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Returning to the United States, where he eventually settled near San Francisco, Saul began to tackle the subject of the Vietnam War. As the decades progressed, he turned his attention to other political and social subjects, painting works that address World War II, US Presidents, state violence, and civil rights. —IK
Born in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 1951, Susan Te Kahurangi King spent the first three decades of her life constantly drawing. During this early period, the artist, who stopped talking around age five, created well over 7,000 drawings that record and interpret her experiences and observations. While she stopped drawing abruptly at age thirty, King recommenced making work almost twenty years later. In King’s works, recognizable characters coexist with figures of the artist’s own invention: fractured, silhouetted, or whole, but always animated through expression and repetition. Her repertoire of figures includes the likes of Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, and Mickey Mouse (committed to memory from the Disney comics King and her eleven siblings read as children), animals she encountered on the farms and forests around her family’s home, and others from the places she visited. Buildings and objects are pulled from the outings King regularly went on with her grandmother, hospital visits for what would decades later be recognized as autism, and the IHC School in Auckland, which King entered at age nine. Her work, which has been saved and extensively cataloged by her mother and siblings, came to greater public attention in 2009, beginning with an exhibition at Callan Park Gallery, University of Sydney. —IK
PL. 313
Untitled, c. 1959–61
Crayon on paper
13 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches (33.7 x 21 cm)
PL. 314
Untitled, c. 1967
Graphite and color pencil on found paper
12 3/8 x 9 13/16 inches (31.5 x 25 cm)
PL. 315
Untitled, c. 1958–59
Crayon and graphite on paper
5 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches (15 x 19 cm)
PL. 316
Untitled, c. 1967
Graphite, color pencil, crayon and oil pastel on paper 18 x 23 inches (45.7 x 58.4 cm)
PL. 317
Untitled, c. 1958–59
Crayon on found card
7 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches (19 x 15 cm)
PL. 318
Untitled, c. 1967
Graphite, color, pencil, and ebony on found paper
11 x 8 1/2 inches (31 1/2 x 25 cm)
PL. 319
Untitled, c. 1967
Graphite on paper
6 x 7.5 inches (15.2 x 19.1 cm)
PL. 320
Untitled, c. 1965
Graphite on paper
12 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches (32.4 x 13.3 cm)
PL. 321
Untitled, c. 1959–61
Crayon and color pencil on paper
13 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches (34 x 21 cm)
PL. 322
Untitled, 1969
Graphite and color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches (34 x 23.5 cm)
PL. 323
Untitled, c. 1967–69
Graphite on found paper
12 3/8 x 9 13/16 inches (31.5 x 25 cm)
PL. 324
Untitled, c. 1965
Graphite and color pencil on paper
11 x 9 inches (27.9 x 22.9 cm)
PL. 325
Untitled, c. 1964–65
Graphite and color pencil on paper
9 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches (24.1 x 21 cm)
PL. 326
Untitled, c. 1975–79
Graphite and color pencil on paper
14 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches (37.5 x 27.3 cm)
PL. 327
Untitled, c. 1959–61
Graphite, color pencil, and crayon on paper
13 1/8 x 8 1/4 inches (34 x 21 cm)
PL. 328
Untitled, c. 1963–67
Graphite and color pencil on paper
8 x 6 inches (20 x 15 cm)
Erik Parker was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1968 and raised in San Antonio, Texas, where he developed an interest in skateboarding, hiphop, and punk. The traces of these early interests can be seen in his work, which references graffiti, comics, cartoons, and psychedelia, and sometimes even incorporates fragments of 1970s magazines and Topps cards. Securing an assistant job at Luhring Augustine gallery, Parker moved to New York City with the goal of becoming an artist after graduating in 1996 from the University of Texas Austin (where he studied under fellow artist Peter Saul). He received an MFA in 1998 from SUNY Purchase and has lived and worked in New York City since. Beginning in the 1990s, Parker has developed paintings and drawings that teem with color and pattern, borrowing familiar images—stock photos and cartoon characters, for instance—and using a combination of fragmentation, enigmatic phrases, and searing pigment to make them unfamiliar once more.
—IK
Joey “SERVE” Vega became known in the New York graffiti world for his dense, colorful compositions during the 1980s. Later, he began to design album covers, in particular for the record label Tuff City Squad. SERVE has created over forty album covers for artists including Bad Boy Orchestra, Tuff City Squad, The 45 King, Cold Crush Brothers, Ultramagnetic MCs, Marley Marl, Kenny Dope, Osunlade, and Brooklyn Friends. As is common for graffiti writers, SERVE also created black books that included designs for future paintings, sometimes complete with a drawing of the subway car onto which the piece would be painted. Black books like these could be traded with other writers, providing both inspiration and a source of competition. —IK
Born in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and raised in Spanish Harlem, Enrique Torres, known as PART or Part One (1959–), began tagging walls when he was around ten, before moving on to painting train cars with his peers in the emerging subway writing scene of 1970s New York. Initially painting his work on the Pelham Line—the 6 train—PART was approached in 1976 to join The Death Squad, a crew of style writers who hailed from a variety of boroughs and neighborhoods. Alongside the crew, PART painted trains with intricacy and vibrant color, raising the bar for New York style writers. While his writing can no longer be seen on the sides of trains, he still produces work and has traveled internationally to produce murals. —IK
PL. 338
Untitled, n.d.
Marker on paper
8 1/2 x 12 inches (21.6 x 30.5 cm)
PL. 339
Untitled, n.d.
Mixed media on paper
8 7/16 x 10 15/16 inches (21.4 x 27.8 cm)
PL. 340
Untitled (Black book), 1980s
Mixed media
12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm)
PL. 341
Untitled (Black book), 1985
Mixed media
11 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches (28.6 x 22.2 cm)
PL. 342
Untitled (Black book), 1985
Mixed media
8 x 5 inches (20.3 x 12.7 cm)
PL. 343
Untitled (Black book), 1985
Mixed media
8 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches (21.6 x 14.6 cm)
PL. 344
Untitled (Black book), 2001
Mixed media
8 x 11 inches (20.3 x 27.9 cm)
PL. 345
Untitled (Black book), 2002–2007
Mixed media
8 x 11 inches (20.3 x 27.9 cm)
Painter Chaz Bojórquez (1949–) began his career as a graffiti writer in Los Angeles in 1969. While his New York contemporaries were painting trains and developing multicolor styles that utilized spray paint, Bojórquez was adapting the Cholo gang writing he saw on the walls of his neighborhood, Highland Park, using chisel-shaped brushes, markers, and paints to expand upon a tradition that stretched back to the Chicano zoot-suiters of the 1940s or even earlier, when writers would use tar on sticks or paint and brush on the walls of their communities. As a student at Chouinard Art School (now Cal Arts) in 1967 and Universidad de Artes Plásticas in Guadalajara, Bojórquez studied ceramics. Without the resources to make ceramics once he left school, he began to paint instead. He incorporated the strong, fluid motions of Chinese calligraphy, picked up during a class he took at age nineteen, into the already calligraphic nature of LA wall writing, which itself co-opted the formal Old English type seen on official documents and the masthead of the Los Angeles Times. Among Bojórquez’s most recognizable motifs is Señor Suerte, a skull with crossed fingers raised, wearing a hat and fur-lined coat, which he began stenciling in his neighborhood in 1969 and which was later adopted by the Avenues gang as a symbolic tattoo that would protect the wearer from death. In the 1980s, Bojórquez began to create paintings on canvas, which have been shown in galleries and major museums like LACMA, MOCA, and the Smithsonian. —IK
Widely known as “The Gonz” and the “Godfather” of modern street skateboarding, Mark Gonzales (1968–) is an American artist and professional skateboarder. Born in South Gate, California, Gonzales gained recognition in the mid-1980s for his innovative style and fearless approach to skateboarding, utilizing urban architecture like handrails, stairs, and ledges to redefine the sport’s exploitation of public spaces. In 1984, at the age of sixteen, he graced the cover of Thrasher magazine; by 1989, he had founded Blind Skateboards. Gonzales’s visual output began in the 1990s with zine illustrations filled with surreal and humorous characters. Gonzales creates across various mediums, including drawing, painting, and mixed media, with a distinctive aesthetic that blends elements of graffiti, Abstract Expressionism, and pop culture. He has collaborated with notable figures like Harmony Korine and Spike Jonze, and has created graphics for commercial brands that include Supreme, Adidas, and Krooked Skateboards. Gonzales is also a prolific writer and poet, and is known for his playful public antics that blur the lines between skateboarding and performance art. —RD
Matt Leines is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist known for his intricate and vibrant works that blend elements of folk art, mythology, and popular culture. Born in 1980 in New Jersey, Leines studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he honed a meticulous graphic style characterized by bold lines, geometric patterns, and a vivid color palette. Leines’s artwork often features fantastical creatures, tribal motifs, and surreal landscapes, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources including ancient civilizations, Indigenous art, and his own imagined narratives. His retrospective monograph, titled You Are Forgiven, was published by Free News Projects in 2008. Leines’s work has been exhibited at Deitch Projects and The Hole, NY, as well as internationally in Sweden, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Japan. —RD
Note on Henry Darger Image Credits
Henry Darger (1892–1973) was a reclusive, self-taught artist who lived in near anonymity—his prolific visual output and work as an epic novelist known only posthumously. Born in Chicago, Darger’s early life was marked by turbulence and tragedy. His mother died when Darger was four, leading his father, a disabled tailor, to place him in an orphanage at the age of eight. He was eventually moved to the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where Darger endured significant physical and emotional abuse. Upon his father’s death in 1908, Darger managed to escape the asylum and returned to Chicago, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He worked various menial jobs—primarily as a hospital janitor and dishwasher. Darger's creative output remained hidden from the world until shortly before his death. In 1972, his landlord, photographer Nathan Lerner, discovered a treasure trove of artwork and manuscripts in Darger’s cluttered apartment. Among these was his magnum opus, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Accompanied by hundreds of intricate watercolors and collages, this 15,000-page fantasy novel delves into the adventures of seven young girls in a vivid—often brutal—imaginary world. Darger’s remarkable oeuvre also included over 350 watercolor, pencil, collage, and carbon-traced drawings, most of them stitched into three enormous “albums,” as well as seven typewritten hand-bound books, thousands of bundled sheets of typewritten text, and numerous journals, ledgers, and scrapbooks. —RD
At the time of publication, The Drawing Center was unable to secure permission to reproduce the following Henry Darger works that are included in the exhibition. —Ed.
Spangled Blengin, All Nations of Christian Nat Ure, Child Headed. All Islands of Every Sea, c. 1940–60
Watercolor, carbon tracing, and graphite on paper
13 7/8 x 17 inches (35.2 x 43.2 cm)
Grimecian Gazoonian, n.d.
Watercolor and pencil on paper
19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm)
At Jennie Richee—Hard Pressed During Storm Persueing Enemy They Become Lost in Cavern of Volcanic Mt, c. 1940–60
Double-sided watercolor, graphite and carbon tracing on three joined sheets of paper
19 x 72 1/8 inches (48.3 x 183.2 cm)
COVER, FIG. 10, PLS. 3–23, 39–40, 45–46, 49, 51–52, 56, 65–66, 71–72, 78, 82, 85, 97, 108–118, 120–122, 124–145, 147, 148–157, 161, 170, 175, 179, 191–193, 195–198, 207, 209, 211, 214, 216–217, 222, 226, 228–233, 236–284, 287–289, 302–303, 307, 310, 329–349, 351, 356 Photograph by Farzad Owrang; FIG. 1, PLS. 221–223 © Raymond Pettibon, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; FIG. 4 Photograph by Joshua White; FIG. 6 Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery and the Susan Te Kahurangi King Trust; FIG. 8 Photograph by Brad Bridgers; FIG. 9 Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan; FIG. 11 Courtesy of Sotheby’s; FIG. 12 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein; PLS. 1–2 © 2024 The Joyce Pensato Foundation; PLS. 3–11 © Basil Wolverton Estate, Courtesy of the Basil Wolverton Estate; PLS. 12–23 Topps® trading stickers used courtesy of The Topps Company, Inc.; PL. 24 Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation; PLS. 25–30 © Estate of Martín Ramírez, Courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery; PLS. 86–88 © Jane Dickson, Courtesy of the artist and Karma; COVER, PLS. 89–95 Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W, New York; PLS. 107–108 © Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian; PLS. 156–157 Courtesy of Christopher “DAZE” Ellis and P·P·O·W, New York; PL. 158 © 2024 Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, All Rights Reserved / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; PL. 162 © 2024 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; PLS. 163–169 © Jim Nutt, Courtesy of the artist and David Nolan Gallery; PL. 171 Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; PLS. 172–173 Photograph by Adam Reich, Courtesy of the estate of Karl Wirsum and Derek Eller Gallery; PL. 179 © Estate of David Wojnarowicz, Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York; PL. 181 © 2024 The
Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; PLS. 182–186 © The Estate of Lee Lozano, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth; PLS. 187–188 © 2024 Martha Edelheit / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; PLS. 190–200 © 2024 Dumbarton Arts, LLC / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; PLS. 201–205 Courtesy of Judith Linhares and P.P.O.W., New York; PLS. 201–203, 205 Photograph by Paul Salveson; PL. 206 © Nicole Eisenman, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; PLS. 207–220 © Robert Crumb, Courtesy of the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner; PLS. 225–227 © Martin Wong Foundation, Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York; PL. 227 Photograph by JSP Art Photography; PLS. 232–233 Courtesy of The Gallery of Everything, London; PLS. 234–236 © Dana Schutz, Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, CFA Berlin, and Thomas Dane Gallery; PLS. 237–281 © Tomoo Gokita; PLS. 282–284 Courtesy of Simone Johnson, Pure Vision Art; PLS. 313–338 Courtesy of the artist and the Susan Te Kahurangi King Trust
Contributors
Rebecca DiGiovanna is Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center.
Laura Hoptman is the Executive Director of The Drawing Center.
Isabella Kapur is Assistant Curator of Research at The Drawing Center.
KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, and largescale sculptures. Over the last two and a half decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies.
Valérie Rousseau, PhD, is Curatorial Chair for Exhibitions & Senior Curator at the American Folk Art Museum, New York. She overviewed critically acclaimed exhibitions, notably When the Curtain Never Comes Down (2015), Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet (2015), Photo|Brut (2021), Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (2022), as well as projects on the concomitance of psychiatric and artistic avantgardes (Francesc Tosquelles, 2024), neurodiversity (IMLS, 2023–2025), the intersections of folk art and art brut (Cahiers du Mnam 166, 2023–2024), and artists William Edmondson, Auguste Forestier, Eugen Gabritschevsky, Madalena Santos Reinbolt, and Bill Traylor (FILAF award, 2018).
Nicole Rudick is the author of What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio) and the editor, most recently, of Joanna Russ: Novels and Storie s (Library of America) and Spiral and Other Stories by Aidan Koch (New York Review Comics). Her writings have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Apollo, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Artforum, and in exhibition catalogs for the New Museum; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; and Derek Eller and Matthew Marks galleries.
Co-Chairs
Andrea Crane
Amy Gold
Treasurer
Stacey Goergen
Secretary
Dita Amory
Frances Beatty Adler
David R. Baum
Valentina Castellani
Brad Cloepfil
Hilary Hatch
Harry Tappan Heher
Priscila Hudgins
Rhiannon Kubicka
Iris Z. Marden
Adam Pendleton
David M. Pohl
Nancy Poses
Almine Ruiz-Picasso
Jane Dresner Sadaka
David Salle
Curtis Talwst Santiago
Joyce Siegel
Galia Meiri Stawski
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Barbara Toll
Jean-Edouard van Praet d’Amerloo
Waqas Wajahat
Linda Yablonsky
Emeritus
Eric Rudin
Laura Hoptman
Executive Director
Olga Valle Tetkowski
Deputy Director
Rebecca Brickman
Director of Development
Rebecca DiGiovanna
Assistant Curator
Sarah Fogel
Registrar
Aimee Good
Director of Education and Community Programs
Isabella Kapur
Assistant Curator of Research
Valerie Newton
Director of Retail and Visitor Services
Anna Oliver
Bookstore Manager
Nona Poydras Visitor Services Associate
Isa Riquezes
Communications and Marketing Associate
Olivia Shao
Burger Collection & TOY Meets Art Curator
Tiffany Shi
Development Manager
Allison Underwood Director of Communications
Aaron Zimmerman
Operations Manager & Head Preparator
Published on the occasion of the exhibitions The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection
The Drawing Center
October 10, 2024– January 19, 2025
Major support for The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection is provided by Neuberger Berman Private Wealth; the Outsider Art Fair; Skarstedt, New York; Christie’s Art Finance; and UNIQLO. Special thanks to 2x4 and Human Made.
This is number 157 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.
Editor Joanna Ahlberg
Design
Dandelion
Printing & Binding
Shapco Printing, Minneapolis, MN
About the Type
KAWS would like to thank:
Julia, Sunny, and Lee
All of the exhibiting artists
2x4; Michael Baptist; Henry Boxer; Anna Maria González Cuevas; John Corbett; Jim Dempsey; Rebecca DiGiovanna; Dan Doyle; Andrew Edlin; Derek Eller; Laura Hoptman; Human Made; John Jay; Isabella Kapur; Frank Maresca; Scott Nussbaum; NIGO; John Ollman; Wendy Olsoff; Farzad Owrang; Penny Pilkington; Michael Rock; Valérie Rousseau; Nicole Rudick; Per Skarstedt; Scott Stangenes; Koji Yanai; Tadashi Yanai
KAWS Studio:
David Arkin
Mark Barrow
Morgan Blair
Michelle Bonomo
Atticus Kaplan
Matt Leines
Eric Smith
Gen Watanabe
This book is set in Publico Text (Roman, Italic, and Bold) It is part of the Publico Collection, designed by Ross Milne, Christian Schwartz, Paul Barnes, Kai Bernau, and Greg Gazdowicz, and released incrementally by Commercial Type in 2009, 2013, and 2014. This book also uses Plain (Regular and Italic), which was designed by François Rappo and released by Optimo Type Foundry in 2014.
ISBN 979-8-9876009-9-3
© 2024 The Drawing Center
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission from The Drawing Center.
Cover
Anton van Dalen
Street Debris on Sidewalk (detail), 1975
Graphite on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.42 x 73.66 cm)
This richly illustrated volume offers the first close look at the artist KAWS’s personal collection—a spectacular trove that includes more than four thousand works by some seven hundred artists, including those who are self-taught and neurodivergent, comic book creators, graffiti writers, illustrators, and visionaries who use pencil and paper to offer an expanded definition of artistic genius. Together, this incredible selection of over 350 artworks—illuminated by text contributions from Laura Hoptman, KAWS, Valérie Rousseau, and Nicole Rudick—challenges long-held hierarchies and opens a portal to a diverse, scintillating, and nuanced universe of human creativity.
Artists
Hilma af Klint
Nicole Appel
Ana Benaroya
BLADE
Chaz Bojórquez
Julia Chiang
Joe Coleman
George Condo
CRASH
R. Crumb
Julie Curtiss
Henry Darger
DAZE
Larissa De Jesús Negrón
Willem de Kooning
Jane Dickson
DONDI
Martha Edelheit
Nicole Eisenman FUTURA 2000
Tomoo Gokita
Mark Gonzales
Rick Griffin
William A. Hall
Eric Haze
Todd James
Simone Johnson
Mike Kelley
Susan Te Kahurangi King
Aline Kominsky-Crumb
Josef Kotzian
Matt Leines
Judith Linhares
Lee Lozano
Gladys Nilsson
Jim Nutt
Erik Parker PART
Joyce Pensato
Raymond Pettibon
PHASE 2
Pablo Picasso
Lee Quiñones
Helen Rae
Martín Ramírez
RAMMELLZEE
Ed Ruscha
Peter Saul
Norman Saunders
Aurel Schmidt
Dana Schutz
SERVE
Yuichiro Ukai
Anton van Dalen
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
Louis Wain
H.C. Westermann
Karl Wirsum
David Wojnarowicz
Adolf Wölfli
Basil Wolverton
Martin Wong
Wally Wood