KAWS 'Elmo' Water Parade 2025 Release Details

Artist: KAWS
Title: Elmo (Water Parade 2025)
Medium: Vinyl Figure
Size: 13 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Price: $75

 

*available at 10pm EST on Monday November 3rd, 2025

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Brian Donnelly, known professionally as KAWS, is an American artist and designer born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York and began his career as a graffiti artist in the early 1990s, tagging walls, billboards, and bus shelters with his now-iconic four-letter moniker. The name “KAWS” has no specific meaning Donnelly chose it simply because he liked the way the letters looked together and how they functioned visually in graffiti compositions.

His early work involved “subvertising,” where he would alter existing advertisements by adding cartoon-like figures, often with his signature crossed-out eyes. This approach quickly gained attention and helped him build a following outside the traditional art world. KAWS later transitioned into fine art, producing paintings, sculptures, and prints that reimagine familiar pop culture characters such as Mickey Mouse, The Simpsons, and SpongeBob SquarePants, infusing them with a sense of melancholy, detachment, and subversion.

KAWS is perhaps best known for his Companion series large-scale sculptures and figures that resemble Mickey Mouse with gloved hands covering the face and Xs for eyes. These works explore themes of isolation, consumerism, and the blurred line between innocence and anxiety. His art bridges the gap between high art and commercial culture, often blurring the boundaries between the two. He has collaborated with major brands like Nike, Dior, Uniqlo, and A Bathing Ape, creating clothing, sneakers, and even cereal boxes that feature his distinctive characters.

Despite initial skepticism from the art establishment, KAWS has become one of the most influential and commercially successful artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2019, his painting THE KAWS ALBUM sold at auction for $14.8 million, setting a record for the artist and solidifying his place in the contemporary art market.

Today, KAWS continues to live and work in Brooklyn, New York, producing art across multiple mediums from massive outdoor sculptures to intimate drawings always with the goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible. His practice reflects a deep belief in the power of visual communication, whether through a museum wall or the back of a cereal box.