As a young street artist, Brian Donnelly (now known as KAWS) would visit PPOW in downtown Manhattan to see work by the painter Martin Wong. A tall Chinese American who loved rodeo clothes, Wong mixed with graffiti writers in ’80s New York — he once kept the influential train tagger Lee Quinones as his personal chef — and painted shuttered storefronts with psychedelic intensity.
“At first I was just interested in the world he chose to focus on,” Donnelly told me. “The brick walls and the abandoned buildings and communities that existed around them.” Growing up in Jersey City, Donnelly would hone his spray painting skills in buildings like these.
Donnelly had little cash — the X-eyed cartoon characters featured in the statues and paintings he makes as KAWS hadn’t yet brought him millions. But the dealers would let him look, he recalled, “and pretend like I was going to buy something.”
Now 49, Donnelly owns over 4,000 pieces, enough to curate a show from his collection at the Drawing Center in New York (on view through Jan. 19). His art, featuring Companion (resembling Mickey Mouse), BFF (Elmo), and Chum (the Michelin Man), is wildly popular even though critical opinion is divided. But he’s broadly respected as a collector — especially of graffitists, self-taught artists, and ’80s New York downtowners. Several standout pieces in the show, like a prickling sketch of a cat by Wong, who died in 1999, and a multi-panel painting of cars and snakes by David Wojnarowicz, a fearsome AIDS activist who died in 1992, he bought from PPOW.
I wanted a window into Donnelly’s shopping habits. He suggested we go gallery hopping. One afternoon in late September, we began at PPOW’s current space in TriBeCa.
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