✨ Familiar Friends: When Magic Became the Platform #00012 — TNoTToys Publications

🌀 This post is part of an ongoing research series from Art Toy Gama’s editorial division:
📚 This Is Not a Book About Art Toy Exhibitions & ToyCons

Our Upcoming Art Toy Book: 1000 Iconic ArTToy Exhibitions

Context: A portal in the middle of 2020

August 2020. Uncertainty everywhere. Masks, distance, galleries on pause. San Francisco had a different plan. Woot Bear opened its door and, for a few hours, turned anxiety into curiosity. The invitation was simple and brave: take The Familiar: the new soft-vinyl by Horrible Adorables, and let 36 artists cast a spell on it. A custom show as communal antidote. Creation as escape hatch. Community stitched back together through a shared platform.

POSTER Reading. What the image really says

Lavender air. A soft glow like a doorway. In the center, a crimson Familiar in a tiny witch’s hat, paintbrush raised. Not a mascot—a maker. Around it, a ring of small characters and tools—mushrooms, scissors, thread, pencils, skulls, a tube that literally reads MAGIC. The typography loops like an incantation: Familiar Friends. It reads like a promise: we’ll do this together. The platform isn’t just a Toy; it’s a vessel. A familiar spirit waiting for your hand.

The show. What we saw and felt

The room worked like a circle of conjurers. One figure. Thirty-six interpretations. Paint over vinyl. Resin add-ons. Flocking, embroidery, soft-sculpt textures. Each piece a single-use spell with its own rules. Alongside the customs, Horrible Adorables unveiled originals that bridged their felt “scale” language with the vinyl body: same world, two materials, one voice. And then came the debut everyone whispered about: Jinxie the Fire Familiar. Candy-apple red. A shimmer like heat. Limited to 100. Bagged like a talisman and bundled with a die and a Ballyhoo coin. A toy drop wrapped as lore.

Why it mattered: Movement, not moment

2020 needed more than entertainment. It needed a ritual. Familiar Friends showed why platform culture is the backbone of ArT Toys: one body, many voices, infinite readings. It also proved that custom culture isn’t a side quest; it’s the core engine where authorship, technique, and community collide in public. And the theme of magic wasn’t cute set dressing. It was permission. Permission to turn isolation into collaboration, limitations into style, vinyl into a story you can hold.

Legacy & mutation

After this night, The Familiar graduated from “new figure” to recognized platform. Jinxie joined the short list of colorways that collectors whisper about. More importantly, the show reframed the object: not product, vessel. Each custom ArT Toy carried the artist’s hand and the year’s weather. Creation felt like alchemy again.

Biography in brief

Horrible Adorables—Jordan Elise Perme and Christopher Lees—speak fluent soft sculpture. Felt cut into scales. Forms carved by hand. Creatures that are strange on purpose and lovable by design. Their jump to vinyl with Squibbles Ink preserved the soul and expanded the reach.
Woot Bear is the West Coast’s hearth for character art. Half shop, half gallery, fully scene. When they say “custom show,” the community shows up.

Final Thought: Art Toy Gama

At Art Toy Gama, we have a rule: Dis(Play) is survival. You don’t just display objects. You display the ways you stayed human. Familiar Friends is that rule in action. A POSTER that reads like a spellbook. A figure raised like a wand. A circle of artists proving that the common—one platform—can be presented so differently it becomes impossible to ignore.

ArT Toys aren’t decor. They’re familiars. Guides that sit on your shelf and make the room braver. In a year that tried to silence us, this show answered with a chorus: cut, stitch, paint, summon. Turn doubt into creatures. Turn distance into tribe.

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#1000IconicArTToyExhibitions

We’re currently building an Upcoming Publication that explores and celebrates
the most iconic and influential Art Toy exhibitions around the world.

Each article in this series helps document, reflect, and invite the community
to take part in constructing this cultural archive — one exhibition at a time.

We’ve seen countless exhibitions since then: small and large, modest and monumental.
And we love them all.

No matter where they take place or the resources behind them,
every ArT Toy show adds something to the Movement.
Some will make history, others will make Memory. All of them matter.

This is not just documentation.
This is Dis(Play) in the making.
And You’re part of it.

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