Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)

Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生, Kusama Yayoi, born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan. via Wikipedia

21 Facts About Yayoi Kusama, by Katie White (2018)

1. Yayoi Kusama’ s iconic polka dots are inspired by a hallucination she experienced while looking at a tablecloth as a child.

No conversation about the famed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) could avoid mention of her signature motif. The artist claims that she began painting these dots after a childhood psychiatric episode. “One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe,” she recalled “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space.”

2. She studied traditional Japanese art.

3. Before moving to New York later in 1957, her first stop in the US was Seattle.

4. Georgia O’Keeffe was her friend and advisor.

5. She broke out to international acclaim in 1966 when she was the first woman to represent Japan in the 33rd Venice Biennale.

6. During the 1960s, Kusama climbed the Brooklyn Bridge clad in a polka-dotted leotard in protest of war and the deleterious effects of capitalism.

7. Kusuma is both fascinated and repulsed by sex and considers herself asexual.

8. She and Donald Judd were good friends and lived in the same building.

9. She had a decade long relationship with the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell, who called her on the phone several times a day.

10. Kusama has lived in a mental hospital (by choice) since 1977.

12. She calls her webs of polka dots “infinity nets” and sees them both as a conduit to the infinite and a form of obliteration.

13. She’s a published author, and even created an erotic newspaper called Kusama’s Orgy.

14. No one art movement defines her oeuvre.