“I’m working while we speak,” artist Kenny Scharf (BFA 1981 Fine Arts) says over the phone from his Los Angeles studio. “So there’s no rush.”

Scharf is painting the backs of televisions, to be exact, just the latest additions to his large, unorthodox body of work. Over a four-decade career, he has created everything from black-lit installations to pool floats to assemblages of plastic flotsam, in addition to his many paintings, sculptures and murals. “I like to do a lot of stuff,” he says. Asked once how he’d like to be remembered, he answered: “as a non-classifiable artist.”

In the early 1980s, Scharf, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and fellow SVA classmate Keith Haring (1979 Fine Arts), emerged from New York’s street-art subculture to become one of the decade’s most celebrated art stars. He has worked steadily ever since. A self-described “pop surrealist,” Scharf employs a range of techniques, media and allusions to create hallucinatory worlds filled with floating donuts, Hanna-Barbera characters and bright-colored, often-anthropomorphic blobs.

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