Guided by her unique vision and unparalleled creativity, critically acclaimed artist Yayoi Kusama has been breaking new ground for more than six decades. In 1993, she became the first woman to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, and last year, Time magazine named her one of the world’s most influential people.
Born in 1929, Kusama grew up near her family’s plant nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. At nineteen, following World War II, she went to Kyoto to study the traditional Japanese style of painting known as Nihonga. During this time, she began experimenting with abstraction, but it was not until she arrived in the United States, in 1957, that her career took off. Living in New York from 1958 to 1973, Kusama moved in avant-garde circles with such figures as Andy Warhol and Allan Kaprow while honing her signature dot and net motifs, developing soft sculpture, creating installation-based works, and staging Happenings (performance-based events). She first used mirrors as a multireflective device in Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, 1965, transforming the intense repetition that marked some of her earlier works into an immersive experience. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 but has continued to develop her mirrored installations, and over the years, she has attained cult status, not only as an artist, but as a novelist.
It’s worth looking at this page from the Hirshhorn Museum site, which has some interesting pictures of the artist and her work http://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/yayoi-kusama/
I hope I have a chance to visit this exhibit one more time during a members-only evening so I can perhaps enjoy it at my leisure and also photograph the one room I missed, which was this one http://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/#aftermath Tim keeps saying this room in particular would be hard to photograph, and perhaps he’s right (although none of them were easy). Regardless, thanks for all the interest in this gallery, and if the exhibit comes to a city near you, I’d try to see it.
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• Seattle Art Museum, June 30–Sept 10, 2017
• The Broad, Los Angeles, Oct 21, 2017–Jan 10, 2018
• Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, March 3–May 27, 2018
• Cleveland Museum of Art, July 9–Sept 30, 2018
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Nov 18, 2018–Feb 17, 2019
Checking it out in advance, posted earlier:
