Brian Donnelly used to break into bus shelters after dark, pop the ad panel out of its frame, paint over the model's face with his own cartoon, and slide the panel back into place before anyone clocked the switch. Three decades later, a museum in Vienna hung his work next to Jean-Michel Basquiat's and called it art history.
Donnelly works under the name KAWS, and Vienna's Albertina Modern opened KAWS. Art & Comix on April 3, running through September 27, 2026. The museum didn't build a straightforward retrospective. It built a dialogue, hanging KAWS' work alongside Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf, Raymond Pettibon, and more than a dozen other artists who each pulled comic and cartoon imagery into fine art on their own terms.
How a Jersey City teenager started this
KAWS was born in 1974 and grew up in Jersey City. The name came from four letters he liked the look of together, nothing more, and as a teenager he painted it on a building roof so he could see his own tag from his high school classroom. The real vandalism started in 1993, when he began painting over Marlboro and Captain Morgan billboards near his parents' house. After he moved to New York in 1996, the target shifted to bus shelters and phone booths, where he pried the ad panels loose, painted over the fashion campaigns underneath, DKNY and Calvin Klein among them, and put the panels back in place like nothing had happened.
From stolen ad space to vinyl toys
The altered panels started disappearing off the street almost as fast as KAWS could install them, taken by collectors who wanted the one-off pieces for themselves. By the late 1990s he'd moved from hijacking ad space to designing limited-run vinyl toys, feeding the same cartoon-eyed characters into a format people could actually buy instead of pry off a wall at 2 a.m. That's the lineage the Albertina show is built on: comics and cartoons treated as raw material serious enough to sit inside a museum gallery, not just a novelty aisle.
Why Vienna built a group show instead of a solo one
The Albertina had an easier route available and skipped it. Instead of a career survey, Art & Comix frames KAWS as one node in a much longer argument about comics and fine art, tracing a line that runs through Basquiat's crowns and text fragments, Haring's subway chalk figures, and Futura 2000's abstracted spray-can lettering. Every artist in the room spent time treating a cartoon vocabulary as something worth taking seriously decades before museums agreed with them.
The argument the show is actually making
Strip away the wall labels and the show is making a specific claim: the same instinct that had a teenager stealing ad panels in Jersey City is the instinct that fills museum galleries now, and the gap between those two acts was never about talent. It was about who got to decide what counted as art. Putting a KAWS COMPANION figure a few feet from a Basquiat canvas isn't a stunt. It's the museum admitting the two came from the same place.
KAWS never stopped working in public either. His inflatable COMPANION has gone up on museum rooftops and city plazas across multiple continents in the years since the bus shelter days, still built from the same cartoon anatomy he was painting over ads with in 1993. Vienna just gave that anatomy a room with better lighting.
Related reading from TasteBueno
- A Teenager Picked Bus Shelter Locks With a Stolen Key in 1996. The Smithsonian Just Cast His Cartoon in 14 Feet of Bronze.
- A Philadelphia Teenager Tagged an Elephant to Prove He Wasn't Dead. He Also Invented Modern Graffiti.
- A Colchester Gallery Just Got 28 Original Banksys. Two of Them Are Walls Ripped Off Real Streets.
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