Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 97. Her studio confirmed the news in an official statement. “She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul,” the statement read. “We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”
The death of Kusama closes a chapter in contemporary art that began in postwar Japan, moved through New York’s avant-garde scene in the 1960s, and eventually spread her work, her dots, her mirrors, her pumpkins, her bright red bob into galleries, institutions, and popular consciousness across seven decades. She was one of the most recognized artists in the world at the time of her death, and among the most singular voices the medium has produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
She was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. As a child, she began drawing flowers not as an artistic ambition but as a coping mechanism for the hallucinations she experienced from a young age, visions of talking swarms of flowers that she later described as defining her earliest relationship with the world. The dense fields of polka dots and repeated symbols that would become her visual signature grew from the same place: a way of centering herself against the immensity she perceived in her surrounding world. Art was, from the beginning, a survival strategy. That it also became one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive creative voices was a consequence of necessity more than ambition.
The Work That Defined Her
Yayoi Kusama moved to New York in 1958 and became part of the city’s avant-garde scene at one of its most generative moments, working alongside artists and movements that helped define the…
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