Magic, Luck, and Friendship: The Journey of FriendsWithYou

Origins in Miami: Seeds of a Playful Universe (2002–2004)

Samuel Albert Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III came from sunny, vibrant places. Borkson came from Florida and Sandoval came from Havana. It seems only natural that their artistic collaboration would radiate warmth and optimism. They met in Miami and began simply by playing together, finding joy in fun experiments that would soon evolve into art. In 2002, the two officially founded the art collective FriendsWithYou in Miami, built on a shared mission: to spread “Magic, Luck, and Friendship” through their creation. This motto wasn’t just a slogan – it was a guiding philosophy that would shape an entire whimsical universe of characters and experiences.

In its earliest incarnation, FriendsWithYou operated more like a toy workshop than a traditional studio. Borkson and Sandoval handcrafted a line of plush designer toys, cuddly little creatures unlike any found in stores. These first eight “friends,” introduced as Plush Series 1, were imaginatively said to be tiny microbes magnified a billionfold, living in our very breath and the corners of our minds where wishes form. Each character had a name and a power: Malfi, Mr. TTT, Red Flyer, Barby, King Albino, Albino Squid, Poppings, and Shoebaca were more than cute plush dolls. They came with booklet tags describing their unique personalities and abilities, as if modern-day spirit totems. In the world of early 2000s designer toys and urban vinyl, these Miami-born figures stood out for being at once endearingly cute and bizarre, lovingly hand-made in limited numbers, and imbued with an animistic sense of life and purpose. “We make magical toys that help the everyday person cope with the daily routines of their lives,” the duo proclaimed on their website in those days– signaling that, from the very start, their art was meant to comfort and connect.

By 2003–2004, the “friends” had multiplied from plush toys into immersive art environments. FriendsWithYou’s studio became a laboratory of play, crafting not only objects but experiences. Their first local exhibitions in Miami were like stepping into modern rituals. In “Get Lucky” (2004), a multi-room installation at The Box art space, they created altars shaped like pyramids and cones, attended by a furry monster guide called the Fur Liaison, inviting visitors on a symbolic journey to “realize the significant effect we can pose on the world… to achieve happiness.”​. This early installation already hinted at the collective’s future direction: blending the language of spiritual ceremonies with a playful, almost comic twist: a temple of play where bright colors and friendly creatures replaced solemn priests and dogma. Get Lucky and other early works established a key principle for FriendsWithYou: art should be an inclusive adventure, a shared experience that could alter one’s state of mind towards joy.

Building a World of Play: Interactive Installations (2005–2009)

As their reputation grew, FriendsWithYou expanded from small plush talismans to room-sized, and then street-sized, installations. Miami’s burgeoning art scene (energized by the launch of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2002) proved the perfect playground for Borkson and Sandoval’s ambitions. In 2005, they unveiled “Cloud City” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s warehouse during Art Basel Miami, marking their first major foray into large-scale interactive art. Cloud City was exactly what its name evokes: an adventurous dream world playground assembled from giant geometric forms. Visitors entering the installation found themselves surrounded by oversize inflatable spheres and pillowy cones up to 10 feet tall, some mounted on casters so they could be rolled around with glee. The space was soft, bouncy, and drenched in bright colors. Formally, it felt like stepping inside one of FriendsWithYou’s plush toys, enlarged to architectural scale. Simple shapes (the cone, the cylinder, the sphere) dominated the environment, their smooth surfaces inviting touch and interaction, while a few of these shapes bore the unmistakable minimalist face of a FriendsWithYou character: two black dot eyes and a small smiling curve. In fact, one recurring face belonged to a character called The Boy, an archetype the artists described as embodying youth and naïve creation. In Cloud City, The Boy and his geometric friends were not static sculptures but living parts of the story. Visitors could slide down fiberglass slopes, push around enormous foam creatures on wheels, and essentially become childlike players in this cartoonish city.

Cloud City established the collective’s practice of “happy immersion”, and even came with its own soundtrack. FriendsWithYou released a music album featuring local Miami electronic artists to extend the dreamy experience into sound. The installation’s success also foreshadowed how FriendsWithYou would merge art and entertainment: that same year, 2005, Cloud City spun off not only music but also motion graphics and animation (they began working on short animated pieces) and even a forthcoming monograph. By 2006, the German art press Die Gestalten Verlag published Friends With You Have Powers!, a book chronicling the collective’s singular fusion of toys, graphics and interactive art. The title underscored the group’s core belief: that there is power in friendship, play, and imagination.

Miami’s community embraced FriendsWithYou’s playful spirituality. In December 2006, the city’s Aventura Mall debuted “Rainbow Valley,” a permanent playground designed by the duo as part of an arts initiative. Unlike any typical mall playpen, Rainbow Valley was a land of soft mountains, rainbow bridges, and cloud slides, all foam-padded and rendered in vibrant colors. Children weren’t just passing time here; they were engaging in a FriendsWithYou story. The installation came with a narrative about Peeko, a small pink mountain who loses his family and befriends a wandering cloud named Cloudy. together, they journey to the magical Rainbow Valley in search of playmates. This charming tale unfolded physically as kids crawled through Peeko’s hollow mountain form or slid down Cloudy. By giving playground objects names and backstories, Borkson and Sandoval essentially breathed life (and soul) into inanimate forms, a direct expression of their animist philosophy. A journalist from Wired quipped that Rainbow Valley felt like “a warped Mario Brothers level,” noting how its fantastical design utterly transformed the experience of a commercial space. Indeed, through projects like this, FriendsWithYou began to demonstrate how art rooted in play could find its way into daily life (even a shopping mall) and still provoke wonder and connection.

Back on the art fair circuit, FriendsWithYou kept pushing the envelope of interactivity and scale. For Art Basel Miami 2006, they dreamed up a one-of-a-kind performance piece: the “Skywalkers Parade.” This was a jubilant procession of gigantic balloons (5 to 60 feet wide) commissioned by Scion and co-created with fellow playful artists like Misaki Kawai and Paper Rad. On a December day, crowds watched a surreal parade of characters float in the Miami sky – a “collaborative way to tell a beautiful story through an enchanted parade,” as the artists explained. This early parade, with its mix of art and carnival, prefigured an even bigger parade moment for FriendsWithYou over a decade later, a moment when one of their characters would drift above millions in Manhattan. But in 2006, the Skywalkers Parade in Miami captured the collective’s unorthodox approach: art didn’t belong only on gallery walls, it could march down the street and make everyone stop and smile.

In 2007 and 2008, FriendsWithYou continued to alternate between gallery exhibitions and public art happenings. The Wish Come True show in late 2007 brought their magic to Minneapolis, while in 2008 the duo took Las Vegas by storm with “Fun House”, a bounce-house installation commissioned for the Hard Rock Hotel. Fun House was essentially a giant smiling inflatable castle, complete with a “romper room,” a funky restaurant, and even a pop-up FriendsWithYou toy store inside. Visitors could literally jump inside the art, unleashing their “inner brats” in what was described as an exercise in the “healing power of fun.” With its squishy walls and floating balls, Fun House was part playground, part contemporary art, blurring the line in a way that made some critics scratch their heads, but made participants grin from ear to ear. As the installation traveled to art fairs and even to the Welt Museum in Berlin in 2009​, Borkson and Sandoval proved that their brand of whimsical, participatory art could resonate across cultures. It was during this period that observers started to note how FriendsWithYou “inverts the practice of religious traditions” (turning rituals into playful acts) “to open a connection to the divine”​. By inviting adults to behave like carefree kids in a bounce castle, the artists were, in effect, performing a kind of secular revival meeting: a joyous, goofy one, but a spiritual communion nonetheless.

Even as they championed play, FriendsWithYou also explored quieter, contemplative work. In 2008, the Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibited their piece “Dream Maker”, a far more tranquil installation: a series of rotating fiberglass orbs painted as friendly planets and stars, like a miniature solar system mobile. Viewers wandering among these gently spinning “celestial beings” experienced a meditative calm, a shift in mood from the exuberant Fun House. This balance between raucous play and serene reflection would characterize FriendsWithYou’s oeuvre going forward. Whether a piece was loud or quiet, gigantic or small, the goal was consistent: to trigger a sense of childlike openness and to reconnect people with fundamental feelings of happiness, curiosity, and empathy. “We use play as an artistic means to foster relationships,” the duo explained, hoping to activate “buried urges playfulness, laughter, and inquisitiveness with an end result of feeling connected.”​ In these years, one could see Borkson and Sandoval methodically constructing the building blocks of their own universe: one in which smiling faces, vibrant colors, and simple shapes became bridges between people, and between the people and some sense of the sublime.

Rainbow City: Exploding onto the Global Stage (2010–2012)

All the threads that FriendsWithYou had been weaving, such as interactive fun, spiritual symbolism, and pop culture aesthetics, it all came together spectacularly in “Rainbow City.” If Cloud City was a playground scaled to a gallery, Rainbow City was a playground scaled to a city block. This sprawling environmental installation consisted of some 40 air-filled sculptures ranging from 8 feet to 50 feet high. Debuting in June 2010 as a commission for Toronto’s Luminato Festival (aptly under the banner “Wish Come True Festival”), Rainbow City was an instant hit. Imagine an open field transformed into a forest of balloon-like totems: striped cones, polka-dotted orbs, wavy tube-men, happy mushrooms. They’re all rendered in a minimalist, superflat style that nodded to cartoons and geometric abstraction at once. The color palette was pure candy: cherry reds, sunshine yellows, sky blues, bright greens. This was a landscape where line and shape were reduced to their most basic, joyous forms, a polka dot here, stripes over there… and where space itself became a sandbox for the public. Children ran between towering inflatables, adults bounced gently against soft walls, and everyone’s inner child seemingly came alive for a moment of collective glee.

The installation’s next stops only amplified its renown. In late 2010, Rainbow City landed at Art Basel Miami Beach, presented by Paper Magazine and pop star Pharrell Williams in collaboration with AOL. Pharrell (an early supporter of the duo’s work) helped shine a spotlight on FriendsWithYou, framing Rainbow City as the place to be at the art fair. Some 20,000 people visited and frolicked among the bobbing sculptures. Then, in the summer of 2011, Rainbow City made its most high-profile appearance: filling 16,000 square feet of New York’s new High Line Park as a public art celebration for the park’s second phase opening. For many jaded New Yorkers, the sudden sight of enormous pastel balloons wobbling against the backdrop of Manhattan’s brick buildings was utterly disarming. It was the collective’s first large-scale installation in NYC, and it arrived with “relentless cheerfulness” by design.

Yet Rainbow City was not mere spectacle; it was “created to allow the viewer to reinterpret spirituality,” the artists asserted. Each gigantic inflatable, they suggested, was like a modern totem, a self-reflective portrait onto which the viewer could project emotions. By simplifying faces to two eyes and a smile, and bodies to bold silhouettes, FriendsWithYou allowed people of any background or age to see themselves in the characters. “Visitors were encouraged to come and be in awe of these large, reduced shapes,” Arturo Sandoval III explained – the awe being the same kind one might feel in a cathedral, but here prompted by friendly cartoonish forms. Through play, an “almost religious scenario of connectivity” emerged, as one critic put it, turning bouncing in a bounce-house into a communal rite. Indeed, if you looked closely at Rainbow City on a summer day, you could see strangers laughing together as they squeezed past a wiggling pillar, or a parent and child lying on the grass contemplating a smiling blimp in the sky. These interactions were the true art of Rainbow City. It was a textbook case of what art theorists term participatory art or relational aesthetics, where the social engagement itself is the artwork. FriendsWithYou folded these avant-garde concepts into a package so accessible and kawaii (cute) that people didn’t feel intimidated by “art,” they just jumped in and played.

Other projects around this time cemented FriendsWithYou’s international reach. In the summer of 2012, Hong Kong’s Tuen Mun Town Plaza was host to “Happy Rainbow,” a 16-piece inflatable bounce-house installation that echoed Rainbow City’s motifs. Happy Rainbow was fashioned as a modern shrine of joy. A “colorful interactive bounce house” integrated with fiberglass sculptures and translucent resin pieces. At 40 feet tall, it quite literally enveloped visitors in a multicolored glow, which the artists intended to “transcend them into a higher state of self-awareness.”​. Even in bustling Hong Kong, thousands came to experience this pop-up sanctuary of play. The installation was described as being “charged with so much color and power that it brings great harmony to all who look upon it,” and local press noted how it blended elements of Eastern spiritual iconography with the universal language of fun. By now, comparisons were often drawn between FriendsWithYou and leading figures of contemporary art who also use bold colors and repetition to transformative effect. Critics called Borkson and Sandoval “progenies of Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama,” acknowledging how, like Murakami, they employ a “superflat” pop aesthetic, and like Kusama, they create enveloping environments of polka-dots and smiles. Indeed, in Rainbow City and Happy Rainbow, one could see Murakami’s influence in the slick, graphic simplification of forms and the blur between high art and pop culture. Likewise, Kusama’s legacy was felt in the way these installations offered a serene surrender to color and pattern – though instead of Kusama’s infinite polka dots aiming for cosmic oneness, FriendsWithYou offered squishy clouds and rainbow roads aiming for childlike giddiness.

Amid these large public works, FriendsWithYou didn’t neglect the art gallery scene. In 2011, they mounted “:)” (yes, a smiley face title), their first solo show in New York, at The Hole gallery. The exhibition featured 22 artworks, including cheerful geometric figures sculpted from wood and painted with glossy car-paint finishes. Critics noted how these pieces distilled the same positive energy of the inflatables into static art objects. The show was dubbed “an interactive, experiential wonderland of pop-straction” and “relentlessly cheerful.” In one corner, visitors might find a cluster of colorful, round-headed sculptures resembling a family of friendly aliens; in another, paintings of smiling clouds floating on fields of flat color. Much like Murakami’s or Kusama’s exhibitions, :) at The Hole demonstrated that even within a white-cube gallery, FriendsWithYou could create an ambiance of playful spirituality. The artists themselves saw these works as part of a “service art” movement, art in service of the people. They deliberately stripped away any pretension, aiming to communicate on a direct, emotional level. “FWY feels art is for everyone and can aid in connecting humankind,” they stated in the show notes. In an art capital like New York, this ethos was almost radical: while many artists concerned themselves with critique or complexity, FriendsWithYou unabashedly offered happiness and friendship as their artistic message.

Animism, Art, and “Happy Virus”: A Philosophy of Play

All throughout their journey, Borkson and Sandoval cultivated a distinctive artistic philosophy that mixes child’s play with mysticism. They often describe their mission as “re-designing spirituality for modern usage.” In interviews, Borkson has explained that contemporary life leaves people disconnected and hungry for meaning, and that art can step in where traditional religion might be fading. The duo uses the term “modern ritual” for their events. A bounce house becomes a ritual gathering, a cartoon character becomes a deity of kindness. They freely invert religious symbols and practices, but always through the accessible medium of play. “We’re trying to redesign the systems that are crucial to our happiness and existence,” Sandoval noted, “It sounds cheesy, but it’s serious talk.”​. By making art that anyone can engage with (kids, non-art-goers, even passersby on the street) they aim to “open a connection to the divine” that feels natural and unforced. In the gentle universe of FriendsWithYou, a smiling cloud or a stubby rainbow can carry profound symbolism: the cloud might represent peace and connectivity, the rainbow hope and unity. This reflects the influence of animism (the belief that objects and natural phenomena have a spirit) on their practice. As seen in their short animated film “Cloudy” (2012), which was launched on Pharrell Williams’ i am OTHER channel, even droplets of water and puffy clouds are given personalities and songs. “Everything in our world has a role and a purpose,” the artists narrate in that piece. By giving the main cast of characters a soul, FriendsWithYou invite us to imagine a world in which every rock, tree, and toy is alive and has something to teach us, a perspective that children readily adopt, and one that many spiritual traditions share.

Visually, FriendsWithYou’s style is a deliberate exercise in distilling forms to their essence. Their use of line is often minimal. For instance, the simple curved line of a smile or the oval outline of a face. Shape in their work leans towards basic geometry: circles, spheres, domes, and rectangular blocks. This gives their characters a kind of primal, archetypal presence, as if they were universal symbols that anyone from any culture could read. The color palette is high-key and cheerful: solid reds, blues, yellows, pinks, often applied in uniform swaths (the influence of the Superflat movement is evident here). There is little shading, so value (lightness or darkness) is mostly uniform. Everything appears evenly lit and bright, akin to a cartoon or an emoji. Texture is usually smooth or plush; whether it’s the slick surface of a fiberglass sculpture or the soft fleece of a plush toy, the art invites tactile comfort rather than analytical distance. In terms of form, even when they work in three dimensions, FriendsWithYou favor rounded, blobby volumes that appear friendly and non-threatening. Negative space is treated playfully too: in installations, they leave lots of room for people to walk among the pieces, essentially making the audience part of the composition. When one walked through Rainbow City, for example, the gaps between inflatables created framed vistas of other inflatables, interspersed with moving human figures, as if the art and the participants together formed an ever-changing painting. The overall effect of these formal choices is an aesthetic of radical simplicity. It bears similarity to the work of Takashi Murakami, who also uses flat colors and clean lines to evoke what he calls a “very warm feeling” beneath the polished surface. It also resonates with Yayoi Kusama’s approach of using repetition and bold hues to create an enveloping mood of euphoria. But where Murakami’s smiling flowers or Kusama’s polka dots often carry subtexts (Murakami’s about consumerism and history, Kusama’s about infinity and self-obliteration), FriendsWithYou’s icons are more straightforward ambassadors of positivity. They consciously avoid heavy-handed art-world jargon. “Esoteric art-speak doesn’t fit our kawaii, optimism-infused aesthetics,” Borkson laughs, “We’ve expanded beyond the gallery to be accessible and understandable. It’s relational aesthetics, but with a deep soul.”​. In short, the duo marry intellectual rigor with innocence: they reference weighty ideas like relational aesthetics (art as social interaction) and open-source spirituality, yet their primary language is that of a children’s storybook.

The notion of a “happy virus” encapsulates their impact. “FriendsWithYou’s work is refreshingly positive and inclusive,” wrote one journalist, noting it is the opposite of the alienating, pretentious vibe that contemporary art can sometimes have. The artists themselves use the term “happy virus” to describe how their art spreads joy in a contagious way. This isn’t to say they ignore the darker aspects of life. “Our work is not only about positivity. It’s about facing the darkness with no fear, the entire spectrum of human experience,” Borkson told The FADER in 2015​. Indeed, by acknowledging the darkness (stress, sadness, division) and responding with light, they see their colorful characters as actants of healing. There is a subtle but important depth here: the happiness in FriendsWithYou’s art is earned, not naïve. It’s a choice to be optimistic in spite of difficulties. “The goal is to create communal experiences that make you feel something beyond the self and into the whole,” Sandoval has said. This goal (to transcend the self) aligns their work with age-old spiritual aims, whether the communal ecstasy of a festival or the self-forgetfulness of meditation. In their own playful way, FriendsWithYou are offering an antidote to individualism and isolation: come bounce in this goofy castle, and maybe you’ll feel a little more at one with the universe.

Collaborations and Pop Culture Crossovers (2013–2017)

By the mid-2010s, the FriendsWithYou collective had evolved from art-world darlings into bona fide pop culture contributors. Their Los Angeles studio (to which they moved their base from Miami) became a hub for multimedia projects that reached audiences far beyond galleries and museums. A defining moment of this period was the release of We Are FriendsWithYou (Rizzoli, 2014), a lavish monograph spanning their first 12 years of work. The book, as colorful and whimsical as the art itself, featured an introduction by museum curator Peter Doroshenko and contributions from some of the duo’s high-profile admirers – notably the legendary surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, and pop musician Pharrell Williams. Jodorowsky’s involvement underlined the spiritual dimension of FriendsWithYou (he, like them, believes in the transformative power of ritual and imagination), while Pharrell’s contribution signaled how deeply their aesthetic had permeated contemporary culture. Pharrell had long been a supporter – he co-curated an exhibit of art toys and sculpture in 2014 where FriendsWithYou pieces were shown alongside KAWS and Murakami, and he often publicly touted the duo’s joyous vision. In the Rizzoli book, Pharrell wrote about how FriendsWithYou’s world made him feel “childlike wonder” and how their work exemplified the idea that art can be for everyone, not just the elite. With this publication, the artists essentially codified their alternate universe where candy colors, childlike wonder and sheer joy reign supreme, a universe now documented for all to see, in glossy pages filled with smiling clouds and friendly blobs.

Around this same time, FriendsWithYou were increasingly working in animation and digital media, extending their reach into film and television. They created several animated short videos (like the aforementioned Cloudy) that distilled their messages into bite-sized, meditative cartoons. Cloudy (2012) is only a few minutes long, but in it a parade of cheerful clouds and raindrops dance in the sky, singing in harmony, conveying a pure feeling of peace. “The purpose of the piece is to transcend the viewer to a peaceful and joyous state,” the artists explained, highlighting how even a YouTube video could serve as a mini spiritual retreat. This exploration of moving images set the stage for their most ambitious media project: “True and the Rainbow Kingdom.”

In 2017, True and the Rainbow Kingdom, an animated children’s series, premiered on Netflix, bringing FriendsWithYou’s aesthetic and ethos to a global family audience. Developed in partnership with fine animation studios (Guru Studio and Home Plate Entertainment) and executive-produced by Pharrell Williams via his i am OTHER venture, the series is explicitly based on the past works and characters of FriendsWithYou. It’s as if the duo’s universe of smiling clouds and magical creatures had finally taken on a life of its own in narrative form. The show follows a young girl named True and her cat friend Bartleby in the whimsical Rainbow Kingdom – a place that could easily be a cousin of Rainbow City. Many of the show’s characters and settings are direct descendants of FriendsWithYou art: there are bouncing geometric beings, living clouds and stars, and an overarching theme of empathy and problem-solving through friendship. Borkson and Sandoval worked on the development and production of the show, ensuring that their philosophy of kindness, animism, and play infused each episode. The result is a children’s program that, unlike the typical toy-commercial cartoons, carries a gentle spiritual undertone. True is not a proselytizing show by any means, but in its stories one can sense the idea that everything around us, from the humble little Wishing Sprites to the big Rainbow King, deserves respect and care. For FriendsWithYou, this leap into children’s media was a natural extension of their art-as-healing mission. They often speak of wanting to influence not just art collectors or museum-goers, but actual communities and future generations. By co-creating a Netflix series, they managed to place their ideas in living rooms worldwide, effectively merging contemporary art with children’s entertainment. It recalls how Jim Henson (with Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock) or Walt Disney in earlier eras imbued entertainment with deeper messages of tolerance and joy – except here the visuals came straight from the language of installation art and designer toys.

Another crossover moment came through the realm of music and events. Pop superstar Pharrell Williams incorporated FriendsWithYou’s designs into some of his projects, and he wasn’t alone in the music world. In 2015, the band Light & Space collaborated with Borkson and Sandoval to create a trippy music video that looked like a FriendsWithYou painting come to life – swirling rainbows and floating characters synchronized to melody. The collective also began exploring stage design, providing bespoke inflatable sculptures for concerts and DJ festivals, turning stages into three-dimensional cartoons. Their friendship with Pharrell led to co-branded merchandise where Pharrell’s iconic optimism (“Happy”, anyone?) met FriendsWithYou’s iconography. These collaborations illustrate an important aspect of FriendsWithYou’s practice: they have never drawn a hard line between fine art and pop culture. Instead, they intentionally surf the wave between the two. “Accessibility is central to everything we’ve ever done,” Sandoval noted, “We’re excited to see our work join the ranks of the Grinch and SpongeBob… We couldn’t be more excited to see it in pop culture.”​ That quote came as the duo prepared one of their most visible pop culture entries – designing a balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

On Thanksgiving morning in 2018, millions of Americans watching TV saw a giant white Little Cloud with a sweet smile floating down 6th Avenue in Manhattan, flanked by two costumed raindrops and a vibrant rainbow arch. This was FriendsWithYou’s Little Cloud character making its debut in the storied Macy’s Parade, a dream Borkson and Sandoval had harbored since admiring the parade in their youth. The Little Cloud balloon measured 30 feet wide and 22 feet tall, a scaled-up embodiment of a figure that had recurred in the duo’s work for years (Little Cloud had appeared in prints, sculptures, even as a phone-case design beloved by Ariana Grande). Now it floated among pop-culture icons like Pikachu and SpongeBob. The parade’s producer noted, “Their cloud is very cute and whimsical. And what better balloon to create than a cloud?”​. For FriendsWithYou, this moment was the ultimate validation of their approach – they had entered an American cultural tradition historically reserved for big entertainment brands and given it a dose of pure art-meets-spirit. Borkson called the Little Cloud balloon “almost positive propaganda… beyond art for us, it’s like world activism and world love.”​ As they walked below the bobbing cloud that day, hand-in-hand with the rainbow streamer, the artists felt they were quite literally sharing their message with the whole world. And in a sense, they were: an estimated 3.5 million people saw the balloon in person, and over 50 million watched from their screens. The sight of the wide-eyed cloud drifting over skyscrapers was brief, but for many it brought a smile. In the era’s charged political climate, FriendsWithYou framed that smile as a small victory against negativity. “We just want to give people hope and some type of relief from our crazy world,” they said, noting that even if they wouldn’t label the cloud political, it was certainly “battling the dark forces” by offering an alternative vision of kindness.

Post-Internet Explorations: From Virtual Worlds to NFTs (2015–2022)

As the 2010s turned into the 2020s, FriendsWithYou embraced new digital platforms as extensions of their long-running interest in play, connection, and immersive experience. One of their most thoughtful experiments in this realm was the 2015 virtual reality project in Miami, Light Spirit, developed with Funktronic Labs and released using SteamVR’s room-scale technology. The piece invited users into a serene, otherworldly space where they could interact with a luminous, shifting entity: a spirit-like blob with the simple facial expressions that the art collective is known for. Stripped of physical constraints, their characters came alive, offering a deeply sensory experience that aligned with the ethos of Post-Internet Art: blending digital tools with real emotional engagement.

But not all digital ventures carried the same clarity of intent. In 2022, FriendsWithYou launched an NFT project called fRiENDSiES, selling customizable characters marketed as future-ready companions for games and digital experiences. The project raised millions, but within a year, it had stalled. Updates stopped, development was paused, and communication broke down. Buyers who had been promised physical rewards reported delays, unexpected shipping costs, and refunds issued under pressure. Some accused the artists of abandoning the project altogether. What had begun as a hopeful experiment in digital community instead left many feeling misled, a “rug pull.” Unlike the joy and empathy that characterize much of FriendsWithYou’s work, fRiENDSiES became an unfortunate chapter… one marked by mismanagement, unmet expectations, and real harm to those who had trusted the vision.

Still, even amid the fallout, the duo continued to produce some of their most beautiful physical installations, reaffirming the strength of their work in the public, tangible realm. In 2019, their beloved icon Little Cloud popped up in various forms, including a delightful appearance at the Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas (March 2019), where the Macy’s balloon was temporarily re-installed for a public event. The cloud had become a sort of ambassador for the brand: a compact symbol of “light, tranquility, and unconditional love” recognizable to many.

In 2021, FriendsWithYou mounted “Happy World” in Hong Kong, one of their largest international showcases since Happy Rainbow. In partnership with the Hong Kong Tourism Board, they sent their characters on a romp across the city’s landmarks. For weeks, Hong Kong residents saw adorable beings (like Little Cloud, Rainbow Worm, Jelly, Hug Bug, or Peanut Butter) appear on trams, ferries, and parks. The centerpiece was a giant Little Cloud inflatable greeting the public in the West Kowloon Art Park (with the stunning skyline as backdrop). This project ingeniously combined physical art with digital outreach: flash mob videos and AR (augmented reality) experiences were produced alongside the installations. In other words, FriendsWithYou orchestrated a kind of transmedia scavenger hunt of joy. “We hope our collection can spread a message of harmony and joy – ingredients of life needed in every corner of the world right now,” the artists shared, noting it was their first event of such remarkable scale in Asia. The choice of Hong Kong in 2021, amid pandemic-era challenges, indeed carried a healing intention – to remind an isolated world of play, togetherness, and color. The image of Little Cloud drifting over Victoria Harbour, cheerful against the blue sky, became an emblem of hope.
FriendsWithYou’s characters come to life against the Hong Kong skyline, September 2021. Little Cloud (center) and friends like Jelly (left) and Hug Bug (right) spread their message of joy in the West Kowloon Art Park. (Photo: Business Wire)
Back home in the U.S., Borkson and Sandoval also deepened their engagement with healing environments and public art. A significant milestone was the 2023 opening of “Little Cloud Dream,” a permanent installation in the lobby of the Guerin Children’s pediatric unit at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. In this work, a cluster of gently glowing Little Cloud sculptures hover overhead in a calming sky-blue room, creating a soothing atmosphere for sick children and their families. The piece functions as a therapeutic distraction, a night-light of optimism in a medical setting. It is a direct realization of FriendsWithYou’s original promise to “help the everyday person cope”​– here, easing the anxiety of hospital visits by offering something soft, bright, and reassuring to look at. Doctors at Cedars-Sinai noted the positive impact such art can have on pediatric care, aligning with research that art and play reduce stress in healing processes. For FriendsWithYou, this was a full-circle moment: their once humble toy-like creations had become literal beacons of hope in a place of need. Similarly, in Miami Beach in 2022, they installed “Starchild,” a permanent public sculpture commissioned by the city. Starchild is a massive abstract star form with two eyes, painted in orange – a new guardian for Miami’s residents and visitors, spreading the gospel of unity in the very city where FriendsWithYou was born two decades prior. Such works signal that even as the duo conquers cyberspace and media, they remain committed to the physical communal spaces – city parks, hospitals – where human connection is most directly felt.

The year 2022 also saw a reflective turn inward with an exhibition titled “Quantum Garden” at Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach. In this gallery show, FriendsWithYou presented new sculptures in materials like bronze and ceramic, indicating a maturing exploration of form. The pieces were still whimsical: a bronze tower of smiling minions here, a wall-mounted clay relief of a cosmic scene there… But the press release revealed deeper conceptual roots. Quantum Garden was framed as the launch of a “generative era” for FriendsWithYou, one in which they explicitly set out to design “a paradigm for new systems of belief.” They even coined the term “open-source spirituality”​, positing their art as a platform where people could partake in shared rituals without dogma or hierarchy, unified only by the pursuit of magic, luck, and friendship. In this vision, Earth itself is imaginatively renamed “Ocean,” symbolizing fluid unity: a place where past, present, and future merge and everyone contributes to a collective spiritual well-being. If this sounds lofty, it certainly is. FriendsWithYou, now with decades of experience under their belts, were articulating a kind of manifesto: to peel away the rigid structures of traditional religion and replace them with a playful, participatory spirituality open to all. It’s a culmination of their life’s work so far, and a hint at their future direction. The Quantum Garden artworks, with their polished surfaces and mythic titles, invited comparisons to modernist icons like Brancusi or even contemporaries like Jeff Koons (who similarly uses high-gloss materials and archetypal forms). But true to form, Borkson and Sandoval imbued them with narrative and warmth – a Tower of Minion (2018) or a Rainbow World Flag (2020) – ensuring that even as they step into more formal gallery sculpture, their pieces remain friends to the viewer, not untouchable idols.

Conclusion: Pop Spiritualists in a Connected Era

Over the years, FriendsWithYou has carved out a unique space at the intersection of fine art, design, entertainment, and spiritual praxis. What began as two friends sewing quirky plush dolls in Miami has grown into a global movement of happiness. They have been called “pop spiritualists” – artists who blend pop culture visuals with spiritual intent, and their influence is evident in myriad realms. In the context of contemporary art, their work aligns with the lineage of Participatory Art, echoing artists like Carsten Höller (who installed slides in museums) or Ragnar Kjartansson (whose performances bring people together) in the way they center the viewer’s experience as the heart of the art. Yet, unlike many relational aesthetics practitioners who often cater to art-world audiences, FriendsWithYou pressed outward to find new audiences. By engaging with Post-Internet Art modalities, they acknowledged that the way people engage with art in the 21st century is as likely to be via Instagram or a VR headset as it is in a gallery. Their strategy of meeting people where they are – be it on a social feed or in a parade – has made their work exceedingly accessible.

Comparisons to peers further illuminate their impact. Takashi Murakami, with his Superflat theory, similarly merges commercial and fine art, and indeed FriendsWithYou’s smiling daisies and rainbows feel at home in Murakami’s technicolor universe​. But whereas Murakami often injects subversive or dark historical commentary under his candy coating, FriendsWithYou operate more transparently in the register of positivity. One might say they flip the script of Jeff Koons. Koons, who pioneered balloon sculptures and shiny toy-like objects in galleries, did so with a layer of irony and commentary on consumerism. FriendsWithYou take the balloon aesthetic but remove the irony, embracing sincerity in a post-ironic age. In this way, they are closer to Yayoi Kusama’s earnest pursuit of a polka-dotted unity. Kusama’s Infinity Rooms inspire awe and contemplation; FriendsWithYou’s Rainbow City did the same, but swapped the introspection for playfulness. They share Kusama’s impulse to dissolve the ego into a larger whole, albeit through laughing rather than quiet reflection.

Their influence on children’s media cannot be overstated: True and the Rainbow Kingdom shows how an avant-garde art concept can transform into a beloved educational show. In an era when creators aim to foster emotional intelligence in kids, FriendsWithYou’s input (teaching empathy, bravery, and friendship through fantastical stories) is particularly resonant. The show’s success (running multiple seasons and spin-offs) suggests that the collective’s ideals found fertile ground with young audiences who will carry those values forward. Likewise, their design aesthetics have trickled into modern design and marketing – one can see echoes of FriendsWithYou in the friendly, flat design of tech company mascots, in the explosion of emoji culture (those smiling faces with spiritual undertones aren’t far removed from Malfi and friends), and in the trend of wellness spaces using playful art to create calming atmospheres. Even healing environments like children’s hospitals and schools are more and more incorporating bright, figurative artwork to improve mood – a practice that FriendsWithYou championed early on. In a sense, the collective anticipated and influenced the broader cultural embrace of “soft-power art” – art that heals, connects, and comforts.

As of mid-2025, FriendsWithYou show no signs of slowing. Their journey from Miami’s underground art parties to the heights of the Macy’s Parade and Netflix illustrates a rare narrative: an artist collective that managed to stay true to their ethos while constantly scaling up their reach. They have created a lexicon of love. A symbolic system in which a cloud means hope, a rainbow means unity, an orb means potential. And they shared it with millions. Critics at times have struggled with their work’s refusal to be cynical. Some ask, “Are these gigantic blow-up sculptures really art?”​ The answer, as evidenced by their critical and popular acclaim, is yes – but they are art disguised as play. By harnessing the power of play, Sam Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III tapped into something primal and universal. People yearn for joy, for community, for a sense of something greater guiding the chaos of life. FriendsWithYou’s genius was to package that yearning into cute, huggable characters and invite everyone to join the fun. They took the narrow, elite corridors of art and blew them wide open like an inflatable castle, saying “come on in, you are friends with us.”

In the narrative of contemporary art, FriendsWithYou stands out as ambassadors of positivity, bridging the gap between the art world and the everyday world. Their artistic journey, from modest Miami origins to global participatory spectacles, reads almost like a modern fairy tale. It’s the story of two friends who believed that even a humble doodle or toy could contain magic, and who dedicated their lives to convincing the rest of us of the same. As we bounce into the future alongside Little Cloud and its companions, the impact of FriendsWithYou can be felt in each smile shared, each stranger befriended in a bouncing crowd, and each moment we allow ourselves to see the world with a bit more wonder. In the end, their art asks very little of us. Perhaps just to pause, play, and remember that we are all friends. And that simple request, delivered in a burst of rainbow color, has proven to be profoundly powerful.
And for that, I am truly grateful.

Photo of Fall, my True and The Rainbow Kingdom Original Character.