Brian Donnelly learned to rob an advertisement box before he ever learned to sell one back to a museum gift shop. In the mid-1990s he was a teenager tagging walls around Jersey City and New York under the name KAWS. In 1995 he flew to San Francisco and met local street artist Barry McGee, whose habit of tagging bus stop ads gave Donnelly an idea he carried home to the East Coast. Around 1996, McGee handed him a tool that unlocked the ad displays inside city phone booths and bus shelters. Donnelly spent years pulling posters out of their housing, painting his own characters over them in his studio, and slipping the altered ads back onto the street before anyone noticed, according to Phaidon.
From stolen ad space to the west coast's biggest KAWS show
Thirty years later, San Francisco gave him a rooftop instead of a bus shelter. KAWS: FAMILY ran at SFMOMA from November 15, 2025 through May 3, 2026, the artist's first major museum exhibition on the West Coast, according to the museum's own announcement. Alongside the show, SFMOMA installed a nearly 36-foot-tall inflatable of his X-eyed character COMPANION on its roof, free to view from the street and from Yerba Buena Gardens below. It was the 14th stop of HOLIDAY, the traveling inflatable project KAWS launched in 2018, according to Axios San Francisco's coverage of the opening. For five and a half months, downtown office workers looked up from their desks at a balloon built from the same character Donnelly once smuggled onto stolen ad space.
The origin story the wall text left out
SFMOMA's exhibition text skipped over the 1995 San Francisco trip that started Donnelly's entire bus-shelter phase, according to a review from Hyperallergic. That is the same city that just spent six months celebrating him with a retrospective and a rooftop balloon visible from the offices of the industry whose advertising culture Donnelly used to deface for free. Leaving McGee's name off the wall text turns a specific, local, criminal act of collaboration into a generic artist's-origin myth, which is a much easier story to sell in a gift shop than the real one.
A critique that stops at the gift shop
The Hyperallergic review argued the show had every chance to examine what happens when a practice built on defacing commodities gets swallowed by commodity itself, and instead pointed visitors toward the gift shop on the way out. The reviewer's read: SFMOMA chased tourist foot traffic and the city's tech workforce rather than dig into what its own subject actually meant, dressing up a merchandising opportunity as a survey of an artist's career.
Donnelly is not the first bomber to end up in a museum gift shop and he will not be the last. But the distance between unlocking a phone booth with a stolen tool in 1996 and getting a 36-foot balloon on a museum roof in 2026 is the whole story of what happens to graffiti once it stops being a crime and starts being a brand.
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