Before opening at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), KAWS: FAMILY had already drawn more than 20 million visitors across prior stops in Hong Kong, Doha, and Melbourne. The show arrived in San Francisco in November 2025 and runs through May 3, 2026, extending that reach with a U.S. audience.
KAWS is the professional name of Brian Donnelly, who began in the 1990s tagging and modifying urban advertising in Jersey City and Manhattan. He later studied illustration at School of Visual Arts. Since the mid-1990s, he has built a body of work spanning painting, sculpture, and product design, unified by a consistent visual language and recurring characters.
The SFMOMA exhibition includes around 100 works arranged on Floor 4 as a sequence of “encounters.” Pieces are grouped in families, which gives structure to a three-decade career without forcing a strict chronology. The title comes from a 2021 bronze sculpture, FAMILY, which features three of his central figures: COMPANION, CHUM, and BFF.
These characters pull directly from American pop culture. Their forms echo icons like Mickey Mouse, The Simpsons, and Sesame Street. The familiarity is intentional. It lowers the barrier to entry, then carries more complex emotional content: isolation, grief, affection.
Christopher Bedford, director of SFMOMA, frames that balance clearly. He points to KAWS’ “iconic characters” and cross-disciplinary output as the reason the work reaches such a broad audience. The mix of street practice and formal training, he argues, produces work that is both accessible and conceptually layered.
KAWS has kept that accessibility intact as his profile grew. He continues to place his imagery on everyday objects—footwear, packaging, and commercial collaborations—alongside large-scale sculptures and gallery paintings. The exhibition reflects that full spectrum, presenting commercial and institutional work on equal footing rather than separating them.
KAWS: FAMILY is on view at SFMOMA through May 3, 2026.
