KAWS WAS A DISNEY ANIMATOR BEFORE HE MADE THE COMPANION

KAWS is Brian Donnelly, an American artist born November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey, who trained as an illustrator, worked briefly as a freelance Disney animator, and built a career on one cartoon with its face crossed out. He is alive and working at 51, with a first Korean museum show still open in Seoul and a European survey that closed in Vienna on September 27, 2026. The Companion figure with X'd out eyes now exists as a 500 piece vinyl toy, a bronze, a floating balloon and a Uniqlo T shirt, and the route between those formats is the biography.

1996: An Illustration Degree and a Disney Paycheck

Donnelly took a BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1996. He then freelanced as an animator at Disney, with work on 101 Dalmatians and the television series Daria and Doug. That résumé explains the product: a Companion is a Disney style character with the eyes replaced by two Xs, a mouse face borrowed from the one animation language every American child learns first.

Bus Shelters Were the First Gallery

Through the 1990s he tagged and altered advertising on city streets in New York and San Francisco. In 1999 he reworked Calvin Klein posters inside New York bus shelters, and the altered posters became collectors' items pulled straight off the street. Reports from that period say he opened the locked display cases with master keys cut by a locksmith. The ads supplied the models and the logos; he supplied the Xs.

Five Hundred Vinyl Figures From Tokyo

The first Companion vinyl figure arrived in 1999 through the Japanese streetwear label Bounty Hunter, limited to 500 pieces, and it sold out quickly. Tokyo stayed his commercial base: in 2006 he and Medicom Toy opened OriginalFake in Aoyama, a store and brand that ran until 2013. His collaboration with Nigo of A Bathing Ape dates to 2001, when the two began working on packaging for KAWS products.

The cast grew from there. BFF and CHUM joined the Companion, each with a distinct posture and the same crossed out eyes, and the three appear together in FAMILY, a 2021 monumental bronze that gave the SFMOMA show its title. A character that reads at two inches in vinyl and at eighteen feet in bronze is what let one artist sell to toy collectors, auction houses and museum curators at the same time.

Nigo's Simpsons Commission Hit $14.8 Million

Nigo commissioned The Kaws Album in 2005, a painting that parodies the Beatles' 1967 Sgt. Pepper cover with Simpsons characters wearing Xs over their eyes. Sotheby's Hong Kong estimated it at up to HK$8 million, about $1 million, and it sold on April 1, 2019 for HK$115.9 million, or $14.8 million, beating his previous record of $2.7 million set in 2018.

That figure is a ceiling, not an average. Kaws canvases averaged $71,046 at auction over the year before this September, a fraction of the 2019 peak. The market prices him as a strong secondary name while institutions treat him as settled history, and the gap between the two is the open argument about his work.

Dior, Uniqlo and a Yankees Jersey

Kim Jones opened his Dior Homme debut for spring 2019 with a 33 foot pink BFF made of flowers on the Paris runway, plus BFF plush keychains and a campaign lettered in KAWS' own typeface. Uniqlo has printed his designs since 2016, and in September 2025 it named him its first Artist in Residence, announced at the Museum of Modern Art. The Kaws Universe UT collection that followed on September 14, 2026 added three new characters, Earth, Moon and Sun, at T shirt prices.

In July 2026 he went further into licensing. His Yankees and Dodgers collection with Fanatics and Topps redrew the teams' own marks with the XX motif, topped out at a $650 jersey and hid his first mainstream sports card autographs inside random packs.

Museums Caught Up in 2026

Three institutions staged him within five months. KAWS: FAMILY at SFMOMA, his first major West Coast museum show, gathered more than 100 works and closed May 3. Friends and Neighbors at Space K Seoul opened July 23 as his first institutional solo exhibition in Korea and runs through December 27.

Vienna made the sharpest claim. Art and Comix at Albertina Modern hung him beside Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, the company a museum offers an artist it considers historically placed, and the final weekend ended September 27.

Thirty Meters in Hangzhou, Thirty Seven in Hong Kong

The inflatable branch of the work keeps growing. A 30 meter reclining Companion at West Lake ran free to the public from September 24 through 27, 2026. Size records here depend on what counts: the KAWS:HOLIDAY float that sailed into Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour in March 2019 was reported at 37 meters, so Hangzhou is the biggest lawn sculpture, not the biggest Companion on record.

The Short Version

KAWS is a Jersey City illustrator who turned a defaced cartoon into a licensing system that spans a 500 piece toy run in 1999, a $14.8 million painting in 2019, a 33 foot Dior flower sculpture and a Uniqlo artist residency. In 2026 the museums, led by SFMOMA, Seoul and Vienna, finally matched the retail footprint, while the $71,046 canvas average says the saleroom has not.