Purveyor of Polka Dots Yayoi Kusama, 97
By • August 31, 2026 0 417
Yayoi Kusama, whose artistic trademarks were polka dots and yellow pumpkins, died in Tokyo on Aug. 14, aged 97. Her repetitive, endlessly adaptable, seemingly playful motifs led some to label her the Japanese Andy Warhol.
Less than a year older, Warhol was something of a social butterfly. But neither he nor the similarly straight-faced Kusama radiated much personal happiness. In fact, it was no secret she led a tormented life.
In her 2003 autobiography “Infinity Net,” published in English in 2011, she wrote: “I fight pain, anxiety and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.” (The book’s racist statements about Blacks were to taint her reputation; she apologized in 2023.)
As recounted in Psychiatry Online: “Around age 7, Kusama began hearing pumpkins, violets and dogs talking to her. She often saw auras around objects and bursts of radiance along the mountainous skyline that made objects around her flash and glitter.”
In 1973, after 16 years in the U.S., Kusama returned to Japan and admitted herself to Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward, seeking relief from intensifying hallucinations that had troubled her since childhood. She believed they were rooted in her mother’s demand that she spy on her father’s extramarital affairs. Kusama became a permanent resident of the hospital four years later, maintaining a busy studio nearby as her fame spread over the decades that followed.
Born on March 22, 1929, Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, a medium-sized city about 100 miles from Tokyo in Nagano Prefecture, around her family’s seed nursery, likely the initial source of her seed-like, floral and pumpkin imagery. She studied art in Kyoto, but resisted the school’s traditional instruction and continued to fight her mental demons.
Along with her freestanding sculptures, polka-dot apparel and dot-ified consumer products — from skateboards to Louis Vuitton bags, watches and shoes — the most attention-getting of Kusama’s creative enterprises were her “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” essentially walk-in kaleidoscopes. Beginning in the late 1990s, she designed more than 20.
Two of the earliest have been on view since 1996 at the Mattress Factory, a museum of installation art in Pittsburgh: “Infinity Dots Mirrored Room,” a black-lighted space with a floor of multicolored dots (bringing Wonder Bread to mind); and the linked “Repetitive Vision,” in which large red-orange polka dots cover the white floor and the three white female mannequins posed upon it, undressed but wearing identical wigs.
In the spring of 2017, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” brought six rooms to the Hirshhorn. Unlike in Pittsburgh — where there is little if any waiting and no time limit — entering them long enough for a selfie required waiting in long lines inside the museum and often outside. The exhibition, which broke attendance records, also included paintings and “The Obliteration Room,” an all-white, living room-like interior which visitors gradually enlivened/defaced by sticking colored dots wherever they liked.
A 2020 follow-up exhibition featuring two “Infinity Mirror Rooms” (among other Hirshhorn acquisitions) was rescheduled for 2022 due to the pandemic.
Another room, “Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe,” created in 2019, is currently available for timed entry through Jan. 10 in “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now.” Also in the Guggenheim show: one of Kusama’s speckled, monochrome “Infinity Net” paintings, “No. 2. J.B.” of 1960, dotted with rice florets.
Kusama’s arrival in the U.S., in 1957, was well timed for her to assist in the birth of Pop Art. For the first several months, she lived in Seattle, where the Zoe Dusanne Gallery was exhibiting her work.
She sent some of her watercolors (three had been exhibited earlier at the Brooklyn Museum) to Georgia O’Keeffe, who encouraged her. Kusama relocated to New York in 1958 and had her first solo show the following year at the artist-run Brata Gallery on East 10th Street. Continuing to paint her “Infinity Nets,” she participated in a 1962 show at the Green Gallery on 57th Street with Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist.
Her 1960s Pop often had an edge — erotic, political or both. She created “Accumulation Sculptures” that incorporated hand-sewn fabric phalluses, stuffed and painted, and organized “happenings” called “Anatomic Explosions” in which volunteers stripped in public for her to adorn their bodies with (what else?) polka dots.
She established a close relationship with Joseph Cornell, the crafter of surrealistic boxes; 26 years older than Kusama, he died in 1972. Back in Japan, she made Cornell-esque collages and wrote novels and poetry.
Kusama’s “comeback” since the 1990s has been dramatic. As Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times obituary: “With her dot-patterned wardrobe and fluorescent pageboy wigs, she was an instantly recognizable pop star, invited to contribute to international art shows and given shows of her own, often of new work produced with a platoon of assistants.”
She represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale. In 1998, a major retrospective, “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,” was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA. Another in 2011 and 2012 drew crowds to Madrid’s Reina Sofia, Paris’ Centre Pompidou, London’s Tate Modern and the Whitney. The New York Botanical Garden installed her sculptures in a 2021 show, “Cosmic Nature.”
Kusama received Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale in 2006. The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Shinjuku in 2017.
In 2000, Wesley Wehr, chronicler of Seattle’s midcentury arts scene, described what meeting the artist more than 40 years earlier was like:
“When I arrived at Zoe’s gallery during Kusama’s 1957 show, Zoe introduced me to Miss Kusama. At first impression, Kusama was doll-like, even delicate,” he wrote. (A photo shows her in a kimono.) “I quickly realized she was a sheer terror as she launched into a tirade about the need for social liberation and free love in the modern world.
“When Miss Kusama found out that I knew Mark Tobey, she asked me to arrange a personal meeting with him. Actually, she didn’t so much make a request as she issued an executive order. … She announced to Zoe and me: ‘In Europe there is Picasso. In America there is Tobey. In Japan there is Yayoi. I wish to meet Mr. Tobey. Will you please arrange this!’”
Tobey’s response: “Please tell Miss Kusama that Tobey does not wish to meet Yayoi!”
Ironically, Kusama, a Japanese woman who embraced American pop culture and counterculture, is far better known today than Tobey, a pioneer of American abstraction who studied Chinese calligraphy at the University of Washington and in 1934 spent a month at a Zen monastery near Kyoto.
