08/27/2026
Yayoi Kusama
(1929-2026)
“A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm.
Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing.
Polka-dots become movement...Polka dots are a way to infinity.”
Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14 at 97, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc. said in a statement Thursday. She kept painting until her final days.
She started seeing hallucinations as a child in Matsumoto, Japan, where flowers seemed to swarm and speak to her. Drawing what she saw became a coping mechanism, and those visions of endless repeating patterns became the engine of her whole career.
She left Japan for New York in 1958, rejecting an arranged marriage her family had planned. In 1962 she sold one of her early "infinity net" paintings to fellow artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd for $75. In 2014, her painting White No. 28 sold for $7.1 million, a record at the time for a living female artist.
She always said white male artists, Andy Warhol among them, appropriated her ideas while she was written out of art history. She staged "body festivals" with naked performers painted in polka dots, presented uninvited work at the 1966 Venice Biennale, and once wrote to Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War.
After a mental health collapse, she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital in 1977 and chose to live there permanently, working every day in a nearby studio from morning to night. The recognition that eluded her early on arrived late: retrospectives at MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Hirshhorn, and a 2024 show in Australia that became the most attended exhibition in that country's history.
"I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death," she once said. "It feels good to be an outsider."
