KAWS Brooklyn Museum 2021 What Party: Complete Exhibition Guide

The KAWS Brooklyn Museum 2021 exhibition, titled "WHAT PARTY," was a major retrospective running February 26 to September 5, 2021. Curated by Eugenie Tsai, it featured over 200 works spanning two decades of Brian Donnelly's career and stood as the largest US museum survey of KAWS at the time.

WHAT PARTY at the Brooklyn Museum: A Career-Defining Moment

When the Brooklyn Museum opened KAWS: WHAT PARTY in late February 2021, it marked something the contemporary art world had been circling for years: the full institutional canonization of Brian Donnelly. The exhibition opened during the heart of the pandemic-era art market boom, when KAWS auction results were setting category records and his collectible figures were trading at unprecedented secondary market levels.

The retrospective ran from February 26, 2021 through September 5, 2021, occupying the Brooklyn Museum's fourth and fifth floors. With more than 200 objects on view, it stood as the most comprehensive US museum presentation of KAWS to date.

Curator and Scope

The exhibition was curated by Eugenie Tsai, the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Tsai had previously organized major museum projects on Sanford Biggers and Swoon, and her selection of KAWS for a flagship retrospective signaled the museum's commitment to artists working at the intersection of street culture, graphic design, and fine art.

The show included paintings, sculptures, drawings, graphic design materials, original advertisements that KAWS subverted in his late-1990s bus shelter interventions, and a significant selection of his vinyl figure work — the first time many institutional visitors saw the "art toy" and "fine art" sides of his practice presented as a single, continuous body of work.

The Augmented Reality KAWS Expansion

One of the most discussed elements of WHAT PARTY was its augmented reality companion, KAWS:HOLIDAY EXPANDED, produced in partnership with Acute Art and AllRightsReserved. Visitors could use a mobile app to place virtual KAWS Companion sculptures at the Brooklyn Museum and in additional locations around the world.

The AR layer extended the museum experience beyond the physical walls and reinforced KAWS's pioneering role in digital-native sculpture — a thread that would continue through his later NFT and metaverse projects.

Why This Exhibition Mattered for Collectors

The timing of WHAT PARTY was extraordinary. The 2021 exhibition fell directly between two of the most consequential moments in the KAWS market:

• April 2019: The KAWS Album (2005) sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for $14.7 million, setting the artist's auction record and signaling institutional-grade demand.
• 2020–2022: The pandemic-era collectibles boom pushed Companion figures, BFF plush, and signed screenprints to documented secondary market highs across Phillips, Heritage, and Sotheby's online sales.

A museum retrospective during this window did three things simultaneously: it validated KAWS as a contemporary artist worthy of long-term institutional collection, it introduced the figures and prints to traditional fine-art collectors, and it created a permanent reference point for provenance — "exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, 2021" is now a phrase that appears in auction catalog descriptions.

The WHAT PARTY Book and Figure Release

The exhibition was tied to two collector-facing releases that have become reference objects in their own right.

The WHAT PARTY Catalogue

Published in conjunction with the exhibition, the official catalogue ran several hundred pages, with essays by Eugenie Tsai and contributions from collaborators across KAWS's career. The signed and standard editions both trade actively on the secondary market.

The WHAT PARTY Companion Figure

To coincide with the exhibition, AllRightsReserved released the WHAT PARTY Companion figure in multiple colorways, including a flagship black version plus pink, brown, and yellow variants released through online lottery and museum channels. Each colorway carried distinct edition characteristics and packaging.

WHAT PARTY-Era Pieces: Current Collector Value

Figures reflect ranges observed across major auction houses and authenticated resale platforms; condition, packaging, and provenance materially affect realized prices. Compare the exact KAWS release, colorway, pose, edition and condition using dated completed sales. Broad archive totals and another edition’s performance do not establish an item’s resale value.

All figures reflect documented secondary market ranges and are not appraisals. Current realized prices vary by condition, edition, and provenance. Sourced from Gauntlet Gallery's internal comp database covering Phillips, Sotheby's, Heritage, Bonhams, and verified resale.

About the Artist

KAWS is the working name of Brian Donnelly, born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, worked as an animator in the mid-1990s, and built his early reputation altering bus shelter and phone booth advertisements across New York, New Jersey, Paris, and Tokyo. His signature motifs — the X-ed out eyes, the Companion figure, the Chum, the BFF — emerged from this period and became the visual vocabulary that now anchors a market measured in hundreds of millions annually.

His auction record of $14.7 million for The KAWS Album at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April 2019 remains a benchmark figure, and his work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions including the Brooklyn Museum itself.

Why WHAT PARTY Still Matters in 2026

Five years on, WHAT PARTY reads as the moment KAWS stopped being "an emerging contemporary artist with a collectibles practice" and became simply a contemporary artist whose work happens to span media. Subsequent retrospectives at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo and the Serpentine Galleries in London built on the Brooklyn Museum's institutional template.

For collectors, WHAT PARTY-era pieces — figures, catalogues, prints, and especially anything with documented exhibition provenance — sit in a privileged tier of the market. They were released into the largest, best-documented KAWS retrospective the US had hosted, and that institutional context is now part of their permanent record.

Authentication Is the Entire Investment Thesis

KAWS work, particularly figures and signed prints, carries one of the highest counterfeit rates of any living artist. For deeper guidance on authentication, edition verification, and what to demand from a seller, see our full KAWS Collector Guide.

Gauntlet Gallery, founded in 2012, has spent over a decade building one of the most granular KAWS authentication and comp databases in the secondary market. For a KAWS or BE@RBRICK purchase, check the individual listing for release-specific packaging, production marks, condition and provenance. Manufacturer NFC is relevant only on releases that include it; a certificate alone does not establish authenticity.

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