PHARRELL WILLIAMS IS BIG BOOSTER OF STUDIO
which combine high and low to comic effect. (Giacomickey is a Giacometti-like figure with Mickey Mouse ears.) Arsham/ Fieg Gallery is showing their colorful 3-D plasteline paintings, which riff on pop culture favorites like Bart Simpson and Elmo.
But the artists have found broader audiences through their lines of sculptural toys marketed for “kids and kids at heart” and projects like their trippy animated television series for children, “True and the Rainbow Kingdom.” It’s now in its second season on Netflix, with another on theway.
“Some art is in its own echo chamber, speaking only to the art world,” Borkson said. “We’re part of a wave of artists trying to affect culture on a deep and powerful level, like Jen Stark, Yung Jake, KAWS and Murakami.”
That would be Takashi Murakami, who had his own Macy’s balloon eight years ago and is a natural reference point, given Friendswithyou’s animation interests and Japanese kawaii, or “cuteness,” aesthetic: Priscilla Frank, a Huffpost writer, once called the team part “Murakami, part Yoko Ono, part Chuck E. Cheese.” But one difference is their scale of operations. While Murakami has dozens of employees in Tokyo, Friendswithyou has three people on its payroll here. (That’s not counting Sandoval’s 12-year-old daughter, who, he said, “could send me a big invoice one day for being our R&D all this time.”)
“We both really like making things; we like being in the studio,” Borkson said. Of the two men, he’s more likely to try to contextualize their work in terms of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of “relational aesthetics” or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “psy- chomagic.” At one point, he also insisted that Little Cloud was “a sweet gift of love but also gangsta and powerful.” It’s “a strong and assertive way of spreading love,” he said.
Sandoval and Borkson were in their early 20s when they became friends in Miami, both feeling a little lost after attending local colleges. Borkson described a rough childhood in Plantation, Fla. — “Well, really, I was rough, not my childhood. My nickname was El Diablo,” he noted — and he left home by the time he was 14. Sandoval, whose father is jazz musician Arturo Sandoval, described the trauma of fleeing Cuba with his family at the same age.
They ended up partying together. “We were almost like ravers, doing these drugs to have an out-of-body experience, especially through music,” Sandoval said. “How do we create these euphoric sensations, minus the drugs?”
They started by making plush toys, hand-sewn creatures that they called “amulets,” with a nod to their supposed healing powers. People were in the market for good luck, and Tower Records placed an order for 10,000 in 2002. In 2005, Bonnie Clearwater at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami gave them a show: They created what would become the first in a line of colorful, tactile museum playrooms. But museumgoers were not their only audience, and their gallery history has been anything but straightforward; various dealers, including Emmanuel Perrotin, Paul Kasmin, Jeffrey Deitch and Kathy Grayson at The Hole, have played roles at different points.
One of their leading advocates is not a gallerist but the musician Pharrell Williams, who spotted their work at Perrotin’s Miami gallery in 2007. He helped them publish a book, “We Are Friendswithyou,” with Rizzoli, and assists in producing “True and the Rainbow Kingdom.”
A main conceit of “True” is that nature is alive and sentient. The series features its owncloud character, Cumulo, who helps the heroine, True, by whisking her to destinations like the Wishing Tree. Other characters include the Rainbow King, an omnipotent wizard who is “also lovable and fallible, like a cute grandpa,” Borkson said.
Since partnering with the Toronto-based Guru Studio in 2012 to create the show, the artists have stayed involved with “True” well beyond the pilot and are still designing new characters and writing premises for stories. “They wanted to teach the ABCS and 123s,” Borkson said. “And we wanted to teach love and empathy.”
Friendswithyou has also been hands-on in developing the balloon for the Macy’s parade, working to make a “fatter and cuter” cloud form. The Macy’s design team suggested adding raindrop figures — costumed characters on the ground — which inspired the artists to add an inflatable rainbow.
“A rainbow is so magical,” Sandoval said. “For us, it’s this metaphysical and spiritual symbol about believing in something larger than yourself.”
The artists plan to carry the rainbow together, each supporting one end, so it’s also a symbol of their partnership. Or, as Sandoval put it, “I think if we combined our two brains together, we’d make one amazing sandwich.”