KAWS and Julia Chiang take the Hamptons

The Hamptons have long served as a wellspring of inspiration for artist couples. Abstract Expressionist pioneers Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and James Brooks and Charlotte Park all made their homes in and around Springs and East Hampton in the mid-20th century. More recently, figurative painters April Gornik and Eric Fischl converted a white clapboard church in Sag Harbour into a community arts center in 2021. With the opening of a pair of solo exhibitions during the Parrish Art Museum’s Midsummer Weekend last month, the Water Mill cultural institution added another duo to that pantheon: Brian Donnelly, the creator of subversive cartoon characters who is better known as KAWS, and painter and ceramicist Julia Chiang.

“We’re celebrating a legacy that we have in the East End of artists from New York coming out here to build community,” says the Parrish’s executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut of the impetus for the shows, which mark both the first solo museum show for Chiang, who is represented by Nicola Vassell Gallery, and the first time Donnelly’s and Chiang’s work has been exhibited together. “I think it’s important to talk about community, about artists’ relationships, and those invisible kinds of support systems that allow them to thrive in their profession,’’ she adds, noting that the husband and wife’s social circle includes another artist couple, Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez, who have a summer home in Orient and whose sculptural mosaics and bold and colorful Bufly paintings, respectively, are featured in another pair of solo exhibitions that opened at the Parrish earlier in the season. All four shows will be on view through early fall.

While Donnelly and Chiang don’t have their own place in the East End—they reside in Brooklyn with their two daughters, Sunny, 10, and Lee, 7—they are regular summer visitors. As a nod to the Hamptons being a place he comes with his family to creatively recharge, Donnelly titled his show KAWS: Time Off after a reclining Companion sculpture that is featured. “We love the beach, and we have a lot of friends out here,” says Chiang. “It means a lot to have my first museum show at the Parrish because we’ve visited since our older daughter was just in a baby carrier.” While their parents greeted guests during a preview, both girls were eager to go outside and hula hoop at a kiddie station set up by Carmen Herrera’s red, blue, green, and yellow Estructuras Monumentales in the museum’s South Meadow.

Donnelly, who started out as a graffiti artist in the 1990s, has shown his work everywhere from bus shelters to the Brooklyn Museum and Kim Jones’ Dior Men runway in Paris (Dior is a KAWS: Time Off sponsor). Part of what appealed to him about exhibiting at the Parrish is the museum’s soaring architecture. The barn-like structure designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron features cavernous galleries that measure 26 feet at their peak, easily accommodating Donnelly’s monumental sculptures. He assembled what he terms a “sculpture salon,” an assemblage of 11 black-painted bronzes, including an eight-foot-tall BFF Companion and a new four-part series—NIGHT FRANKEN, NIGHT BOO, NIGHT COUNT, and NIGHT FRUTE—modeled on the General Mills cereal monsters with “X”s for eyes that are each between five and six feet tall. The sculptures sit directly on the floor rather than on pedestals so the public can more directly engage with them. “Having them all in one color, in one space, you can just concentrate on the forms and maybe forget that they’re characters,” Donnelly says.

Donnelly and Chiang have always kept their work separate, and on the face of it, their art practices couldn’t be more different. His is resolutely representational: In addition to the sculpture salon, the show includes a gallery filled with canvases shaped like Snoopy and Felix the Cat and new cereal box paintings. Hers features abstracted pourings of paints on wood panels and biomorphic ceramics covered in layered glazes that are inspired by medical scans and the idea of the body as a vessel. At the Parrish, their paintings occupy open galleries situated across a corridor, inviting comparison: Both favor bright pigments, and within Donnelly’s shaped canvases he too works with intricate webs of shapes and forms. “What was exciting for me was being able to see his show from my galleries and knowing that he could see mine from his,” says Chiang.

Read GRAZIA USA’s Hamptons August Gazette: