The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection

About

Since the mid 1990s, the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) has collected over 3,000 works on paper by a wide variety of artists, ranging from Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning to graffiti writer Dondi. His collection is particularly rich in drawings by self-taught artists, historical and contemporary, comic artists, and graffiti artists. It contains masterpieces by Adolf Wölfli, Martín Ramírez and Helen Rae, extraordinary sketchbooks pages by legendary graffiti writers like Lee Quiñones, comics by Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin, and a cache of drawings by Chicago Imagist artists including Jim Nutt, and Gladys Nilsson, among many others. For this exhibition, KAWS will curate a selection of more than two hundred drawings from his collection in an exhibition of his own design that will occupy the entirety of The Drawing Center’s gallery spaces. Continuing The Drawing Center’s tradition of exhibiting drawings from outstanding public and private collections, this presentation will shed light on KAWS’s unique connoisseurship and give context to his own art, disseminated to millions via public sculpture, multimedia artworks, products, and interactive experiences.