"For the poster of my exhibition in Los Angeles at the Dwan Gallery in October 1963, I gave in to the inevitable and did a series of drawings based on the head of Mickey Mouse. The forms were distorted but still soft, curvy, and humanized like the original. Two years later, I reduced the components to a simple schematic form, almost like a children's drawing, but more geometrical. This form, which somewhat resembles the profile of an early film camera, was suitable to architecture. The eyes became windows and, in 1965, I started drawings for a building in the shape of the geometric mouse head to house my 'museum of popular art,' which was later to become the Mouse Museum. The hard-edged, symmetrical geometric mouse head, gazing vacantly in one or another state of detachment, is far removed from the Disney version. In 1969, I designated a geometric mouse head in black intended for T-shirts to be worn by students at the new California School of the Arts. Since the school was founded by the Disney family, I thought the geometric mouse head might become an anarchistic emblem of student independence, but the idea did not catch on.
The geometric mouse head has been put to many other uses, from a mask in the performance Moveyhouse (1965) to the letterhead of my exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1965 - the latter use making it a kind of alter ego." Claes Oldenburg quoted in Claes Oldenburg: Multiples in Retrospect 1964 – 1990, p.108