Yayoi Kusama

Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Kusama was inspired, however, by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly coloured polka dots. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.

EXHIBITION LIST

• 1976: Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art
• 1983: Yayoi Kusama's Self-Obliteration (Performance) at Video Gallery SCAN, Tokyo, Japan
• 1987: Fukuoka, Japan
• 1989: Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York
• 1993: Represented Japan at the Venice Biennale
• 1996: Recent Works at Robert Miller Gallery
• 1998–1999: Retrospective exhibition of work toured the US and Japan
• 1998: "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,1958–1969", LACMA
• 1998–99: "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,1958–1969" – exhibit traveled to Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo)
• 2000: Le Consortium, Dijon
• 2001–2003: Le Consortium – exhibit traveled to Maison de la Culture du Japon, Paris; Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; and Artsonje Center, Seoul
• 2004: KUSAMATRIX, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
• 2004–2005: KUSAMATRIX traveled to Art Park Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo Art Park, Hokkaido); Eternity – Modernity, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan)
• 2007: FINA Festival 2007. Kusama created Guidepost to the New Space, a vibrant outdoor installation for Birrarung Marr beside the Yarra River in Melbourne. In 2009, the Guideposts were re-installed at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, this time displayed as floating "humps" on a lake.
• 2008: The Mirrored Years, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
• 2009: The Mirrored Years traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
• August 2010: Aichi Triennale 2010, Nagoya. Works were exhibited inside the Aichi Arts Center, out of the center and Toyota car polka dot project.
• 2010: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen purchased the work Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli's Field. As of 13 September of that year the mirror room is permanently exhibited in the entrance area of the museum.
• July 2011: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
• 2012: Tate Modern, London. Described as "akin to being suspended in a beautiful cosmos gazing at infinite worlds, or like a tiny dot of fluoresecent plankton in an ocean of glowing microscopic life", the exhibition features a retrospective spanning Kusama's entire career.
• 15 July 2013 – 3 November 2013: Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, Korea
• 30 June 2013 – 16 September 2013: MALBA, the Latinamerican Art Museum of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 22 May 2014 – 27 June 2014: Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil
• 17 September 2015 – 24 January 2016: In Infinity, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
• 12 June – 9 August 2015: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Theory, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia. This was the artist's first solo exhibition in Russia.
• 19 February – 15 May 2016: Yayoi Kusama – I uendeligheten, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway
• 20 September 2015 – September 2016: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room, The Broad, Los Angeles, California
• 12 June – 18 September 2016: Kusama: At the End of the Universe, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, Texas
• 1 May 2016 – 30 November 2016: Yayoi Kusama: Narcissus Garden, The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut.
• 25 May 2016 – 30 July 2016: Yayoi Kusama: sculptures, paintings & mirror rooms, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
• 7 October 2016 – 22 January 2017: Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity, organised by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Moderna Museet/ArkDes and Helsinki Art Museum HAM in Helsinki, Finland.
• 5 November 2016 – 17 April 2017: "Dot Obsessions – Tasmania", MONA: Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia.
• 23 February 2017 – 14 May 2017: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, a traveling museum show originating at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
• 30 June 2017 – 10 September 2017: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, exhibition travels to Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
• 9 June 2017 – 3 September 2017: Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, National Gallery Singapore.
• October 2017 – January 2018: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, exhibition travels to The Broad, Los Angeles, California
• October 2017 – February 2018: Yayoi Kusama: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
• November 2017 – February 2018: Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow and Obliteration Room, GOMA, Brisbane, Australia
• December 2017 – April 2018: Flower Obsession, Triennial, NGV, Melbourne, Australia
• March 2018 – February 2019"Pumpkin Forever'(Forever Museum of ContemporaryArt), Gion-Kyoto, Japan
• March–May 2018: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, exhibition travels to Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• March–July 2018: Yayoi Kusama: All About My Love, Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan
• May–September 2018: Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta, Indonesia
• July–September 2018: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, exhibition travels to Cleveland Museum of Art, exhibition travels to Cleveland, Ohio
• July–November 2018: Yayoi Kusama: Where The Lights In My Heart Go, exhibition travels to deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA
• 26 July 2018 - Spring 2019: Yayoi Kusama: With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever (2011)
• March–September 2019: Yayoi Kusama, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands
• 9 November 2019 – 14 December 2019: Yayoi Kusama: Everyday I Pray For Love, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY
• 4 January – 18 March 2020: Brilliance of the Souls, Maraya, AlUla
• 4 April – 19 September 2020: Yayoi Kusama: "One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection," Washington, DC
• 31 July 2020 – 3 January 2021: STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World, Tokyo, Japan
• 10 April 2020 – 31 October 21: Kusama: Cosmic Nature, New York Botanical Garden, New York, NY
• 15 November 2021 - 23 April 2022: "Yayoi Kusama : A Retrospective", Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel

PERMANENT INFINITY ROOM INSTALLATIONS

• Infinity Dots Mirrored Room (1996), Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Infinity Mirror Room fireflies on Water (2000), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, Nancy (France)
• You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies (2005), Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
• Gleaming Lights of the Souls (2008), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
• The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), The Broad, Los Angeles, California
• The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens (2015), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
• Phalli's Field (1965/2016), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Love is Calling (2013/2019), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
• Light of Life (2018), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
• Brilliance of the Souls (2019), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta, Indonesia
• Infinity Mirror Room – Let's Survive Forever (2019), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario

Yayoi Kusama's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

In 2017, a fifty-year retrospective of Kusama's work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. That same year, the Yayoi Kusama Museum was inaugurated in Tokyo. Other major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art (1998), the Whitney Museum (2012), and the Tate Modern (2012). In 2015, the website Artsy named Kusama one of its top 10 living artists of the year.

Kusama has received many awards, including the Asahi Prize (2001); Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003); the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Order of the Rising Sun (2006); and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art. In October 2006, Kusama became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's highest honors for internationally recognized artists. She also received the Person of Cultural Merit (2009) and Ango awards (2014). In 2014, Kusama was ranked the most popular artist of the year after a record-breaking number of visitors flooded her Latin American tour, Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession. Venues from Buenos Aires to Mexico City received more than 8,500 visitors each day.