Kenny Scharf’s latest retrospective exhibition at the Brant Foundation is a kaleidoscopic journey through his decades-long career. Known for his fusion of high art and pop culture, Scharf’s work pulses with the vibrancy of the downtown New York scene where he came of age in the late ’70s. This era, marked by cutting-edge musical, performance, and artistic collaborations, cemented his relationships with icons like Keith Haring as he developed a personal practice rooted in spontaneity and accessibility.

Whether it’s boom boxes and TVs evocative of a previous analog era or portraits that immortalize friends and collaborators, Scharf has a knack for transforming everyday items into vessels of memory and joy. His installations, like the legendary day-glo basement-room Cosmic Cavern, revel in impermanence, celebrating art’s ephemeral nature: sometimes a moment is just a moment.

At the Brant Foundation, Scharf’s world comes alive, offering a technicolor glimpse into his journey from a young art student swept up in the chaos of New York to a celebrated artist whose work remains as dynamic and relevant as ever.

Nick Vogelson: Kenny, first of all, congrats on the Brant Foundation show. Tell me a little bit about when you first started making work in New York.

Kenny Scharf: Well, I moved to New York in ’78. I was a young art student. I went to SVA, and I immediately got swept up in everything that was going on in New York, which was music and performance. Of course, my main entrance was art. The first week of school I met Joey Arias, I walked into Fiorucci, I met Keith Haring, I met Basquiat, I met all these important people in my life just two weeks into moving to New York. Next thing I knew, I’m on stage dancing at Max’s Kansas City behind Klaus Nomi. It was all really quick and exciting.

Nick: When I think about your work, to me, it is divided into two very broad categories. The first, obviously, is paint on flat surfaces, and then the art objects. Where did your practice start, painting and objects simultaneously, or did one lead to the other?

Kenny: I’ve been painting my whole life, it’s pretty much been my number one thing since I was a toddler. I didn’t know what else I could do. You know, when you get out of high school and you’re like, Okay, now, what do I do? I have to think about something to do to make money, or whatever. I thought Oh, I’ll be an architect. I’m very interested in architecture to this day, and I think a lot of the work I do is maybe architectural sometimes, but nonetheless, I applied to architecture schools and didn’t get accepted. And then I said, I’m going to go to art school. I can be a graphic artist. Back then, it was like, how do you make a living being an artist? And most people including me thought, Oh, I’ll make, you know, illustrations for things. So I went and applied to all these different art schools. Really, I wanted to move to New York, but I promised my parents I would apply to schools in LA as well. And I didn’t get accepted to any school other than SVA, which was great because of everyone I met, and New York City is where I wanted to be.

To answer the question, art is something I’ve always done and has always been my main interest, it all came at once. There were all these light and space artists and all these important movements going on here in LA, but as a kid living in the valley, I had no idea. All I knew was Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock and the New York experience. I just wanted to be in New York, so as soon as I got there, I really became entranced. The art education was more being in New York City than the actual school itself, because New York City was just mind blowing. I mean, it still is.

Nick: Speaking of New York City being the education, can you talk me through some of the portraits in the far in the back middle room? I saw Klaus [Nomi]…

Kenny: Patti Smith, Ru Paul, Paul Rubens, Vincent Gallo, Ann Magnuson, Drena De Niro, Alva Clemente, Peter Brad, Stephanie Seymour, my God, Dennis Hopper, I’m closing my eyes trying to think of the room. I’m forgetting some of them.

There’s a lot more portraits than just what I did in that time period, but those are the ones that made it to the show. So the two portraits, the Klaus portrait, was from 1979 and then there’s another portrait of Patti Smith, which is, I think, from 1977. I wanted to include those to show that portraiture is not just something I did once and only once, it has been part of my practice, and people don’t know that. When I moved to LA in ’99 I felt like I wanted to connect a little bit with the community of artists that were living there, and that’s when I thought, I’m going to do a portrait show. So I set up a room in my studio here in LA, very Hollywood lighting. I had my guy, Dave take the photo—we just had a seat and a lighting set up. And I would work from these photographs. So yeah, that’s how that came about.

“I still believe that your everyday, mundane, boring tasks become elevated through interaction with art.”

Left: Ru Dream (Ru Paul),2001. © Kenny Scharf. Courtesy Kenny Scharf Studio. Right: Boom Box,1982. ©Kenny Scharf. Courtesy Kenny Scharf Studio.

Nick: I thought that room was so powerful, because I thought it very clearly illustrated your New York education. The objects that I was drawn to the most were actually the speakers and the boom boxes, because I felt that as an object, they perfectly encapsulate so much. The technology, the sound, the vibe, the mood. What were your favorite of the objects?

Kenny: I was happy to see the giant TV, because for me to see these pieces, it can be like seeing some old friends I haven’t seen in decades. Some of them were very sentimental. There was a boom box that was owned by Keith [Haring]. And you see a lot of photographs of him back in the day, he was posing with it quite often. Speaking of Keith, there’s an answering machine with the messages still on it, and there’s a message from Keith on it that’s in the show.

The thing about the appliances—the radios, the telephones—the purpose of them is not just as an object, their purpose is as something to be used. It’s about art and life and how you mix. A real artist is not just someone who makes products, they are someone who lives the life. And I thought, Well, what is more exemplative of modern life than appliances? I still believe that your everyday, mundane, boring tasks become elevated through interaction with art.

Nick: I couldn’t agree more. A lot of your art is ephemeral, you know, it is site specific. There’s actually still a beautiful mural right by where Cosmic Cavern was—that is still on the greats—and it’s now next to a brewery. The mural is still there, and it still looks incredible.

Kenny: Is it still there? I thought someone took it down.

Nick: I drove by the other day, it’s still there.

Kenny: Good to know!

Nick: How do you deal, as an artist, with the idea of things being ephemeral, and of things being timeless? Obviously for street art, you don’t have control over it. For these objects, they have a life of their own. How does that figure into your practice?

Kenny: It actually figures a lot, because it helps you realize that the object itself isn’t the precious thing. You might do a mural, and it’s very powerful, but it might only last one day. You don’t know when you put something out in the street, so that’s part of the artwork. Like, when you do something in the street, you get a lot out of it because it’s very exciting, and a lot of people can see it and it’s involved in the culture. But at the same time, your work might be up for 10 years and it’s gone the next day. You put things out, and sometimes they stay alive and they keep going, and sometimes it’s just a memory. When something is so ephemeral, it’s easier to not be so contrived. That nature forces you to use spontaneity and these things that come from outside yourself, and chance. That’s part of the fun to me, the energy of, Okay, what am I going to do? There’s the wall, and boom, you do it. You don’t think about it too long.

Nick: I remember the closing party for Cosmic Cavern. Would you ever do a new Cosmic Cavern? Or do you feel like that was so linked to a time and a place?

Kenny: It was linked to a time in the place, but at the same time, the Cosmic Cavern incarnation that you know, was linked to another time and place before it was ‘Cosmic Cavern’ called The Closet, because the original [installation idea] was in a closet. I made this installation in a closet back in the early ’80s that I shared in a crazy old house near Times Square that I shared with Keith Haring, and it was like a walk-in closet. So you could fit a number of people in there. That’s where it started, the parties that went on. When I moved to Brooklyn, I had this basement that I didn’t know what to do with, because it was so huge but it flooded all the time. So I was like, Well, I can’t do anything serious here. So I decided to take all these pieces from The Closet, and call it the Cosmic Cavern.

The thing about the Cosmic Cavern was because I lived there, it wasn’t just a temporary exhibition. This show was up for like, you know, a few years. So it enabled me to really work on it. It had a dance floor, we got a sound system, we had a bar, it was totally illegal. There’s only one entrance in and out, and it was very scary and crowded. It was fun, but it was a time and a place from another time and a place. The spirit of it was that it wasn’t planned, it just kept growing, and really became something. And in a way, towards the end, became a burden. I was very happy to let it go, because those parties are really a lot of work. I would love to do another crazy, psychedelic Cosmic Cavern, but it would need to be in a permanent space like the one I had, because to do something on that scale and then have to take it down is hard.

Nick: No, I get it.

Kenny: Can you imagine I had to take that thing down?

Nick: No, I cannot.

Kenny: It was so crazy. I can’t believe I ended up being able to do it.