The Yayoi Kusama exhibit “Infinity Mirrors” at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden http://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/ is the hottest show in Washington this year and is almost impossible to get into. Its six mirrored rooms are fantastical and fascinating, but you have to spend about 30-45 minutes in line waiting to get into each one, after which you are allowed exactly 20 SECONDS to view it along with two other people. The museum staff have stopwatches and throw you out when your time is up. Needless to say, not a good situation for picture taking, but we did what we could under the difficult circumstances.

A description of this room from the Hirshhorn:

Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field
1965/2016
Stuffed cotton, board, and mirrors
Collection of the artist
Kusama spent much of her time between 1962 and 1964 sewing thousands of stuffed fabric tubers and grafting them to furniture and found objects to create her Accumulation sculptures. She exhibited the works together in an attempt to create hallucinatory scenes of phallic surfaces but found the labor involved in making them physically and mentally taxing. In response to the labor intensity of this work, she started to utilize mirrors to achieve similar repetition. Infinity Mirror Room— Phalli’ s Field was perhaps the most important breakthrough for Kusama during this immensely fruitful period. The reflective surfaces allowed her vision to transcend the physical limitations of her own productivity. Furthermore, the mirrors created a participatory experience by casting the visitor as the subject of the work, a feature that the artist demonstrated through a provocative series of self-portraits in which she used her body to activate the space. This work first appeared in the exhibition Floor Show, held at Castellane Gallery, in New York, in 1965.

A bit oversize, posted earlier: