If polka-dots had memories, they would certainly owe a special thanks to Yayoi Kusama for their popularity. This groundbreaking Japanese artist has been painting polka-dots on her artwork, nude models, buildings and just about anything she could for decades. And now, it’s hard for many of us to think of a polka-dot without thinking of Yayoi after exhibitions of her artwork have traveled throughout the world for decades.
Lest polka-dots get jealous, the 91-year-old artist (whose lifetime sales total nearly $200 million) is even more well known these days for her Infinity Mirror Rooms - the latest of which will be featured at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio as a part of their Limitless! Five Women Reshape Contemporary Art exhibition debuting March 4, 2021.
The installation is the first Infinity Mirror Room featuring pumpkins created by Kusama since 1991, and immerses visitors in a mirrored space populated with otherworldly neon pumpkins dancing to their own polka-dotted rhythm. Yayoi’s All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is on loan to the McNay from the Dallas Museum of Art.
As an elementary school student, pumpkins were one of Kusama’s favorite sketching subjects. Their earthy and organic forms enchanted and charmed her. “I love pumpkins,” the artist explained in a 2015 interview, “because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality.”
It is easy to understand Yayoi’s affinity with these fleshy relatives of the gourd, if you also understand her turbulent childhood. Kusama’s affluent merchant family owned a plant nursery and seed farm, but were deeply opposed to her passion for art. Additionally, when she was ten, Yayoi started experiencing vivid hallucinations which included ‘dense fields of dots.’ Instead of being consumed, the resilient young woman began covering her walls, floors, canvases and household objects with her trademark polka dots, in a process she called ‘self-obliteration.’ As she details in her 2003 autobiography, Infinity Net, covering the world with dots allowed Yayoi to assimilate herself into her hallucinations and ‘into something timeless.’
Kusama dreamed of being a famous American artist. At the library one day, she discovered the work of Georgia O’Keefe and was struck not only by Georgia’s bold art, but by her resonant presence in a world traditionally dominated by men. Yayoi took a chance, sent some watercolors to O’Keefe, and asked for her advice. “I’m only on the first step on the long and difficult life of being a painter. Will you kindly show me the way?” To her surprise, O’Keefe answered. “Would you like me to send your work to some dealers who might be interested?”
O’Keefe also advised the young woman of the difficulties of being a female artist and promised she would do everything she could to help Yayoi from her removed vantage point, the desert of New Mexico. Inspired by O’Keefe, Yayoi left Japan for America in 1956, at the age of 27. “Give me enough crisp dollars,” Kusama quipped, “and I would buy a boundless expanse of grassy plains somewhere in Texas, just for myself.”
In less than one month, Yayoi Kusama, the ‘Polka Dot Princess’ will celebrate her 92nd birthday. In 1977 she moved into an open ward in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she has lived ever since. Each day, she walks across the street to her studio and works until six or seven in the evening and then returns home to write.
Since 1977 Kusama has published a book of poems and paintings, entitled 7, nine surrealistic novels and her autobiography, Infinity Net. About her companion, the eternal polka-dot, she writes, “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, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement… Polka-dots are a way to infinity.”
The McNay exhibition which includes Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room runs from March 4 - September 19th, 2021. For more information visit McNayArt.org. To learn more about Yayoi Kusama, visit yayoi-kusama.jp, read her autobiography Infinity Net, or watch Heather Lenz’s 2018 documentary, Kusama: Infinity.
