If William Blake believed you could find a universe in a grain of sand, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama believes you can find it in a polka dot. This remarkable 95-year-old multimedia creator is the top-selling woman artist in the world. In 2024 alone her polka-dotted work can be seen from San Francisco to Rochester to Miami, from London to Barcelona, and on permanent display in the Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
The polka dot is Kusama’s signature, from a single spot that represents her own life to multiple dots strewn over brightly colored surfaces that create what she calls “infinity nets.” “Dots are symbols of the world, the cosmos,” she has said. “The Earth is a dot, the moon, sun, the stars are all made up of dots. You and me, we are dots.”
“Dots are symbols of the world, the cosmos”
As Kusama writes in her 2002 autobiography, “Infinity Net,” her favorite image was inspired by the “hundreds of millions of white pebbles” in the riverbed behind her house where she played as a “disconsolate” child. Now her dots parade triumphantly over canvases, art installations, sculptures, even her own clothing that looks like an art piece itself, as she wears, for example, lipstick red dresses and egg-yolk yellow socks, all decorated with jaunty black dots. Her neon red bob and razor-straight bangs complete her look and make her instantly recognizable in photographs.
The Princess of Polka Dots
I had the joy of seeing several of Kusama’s dazzling works earlier this year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Christopher Bedford, the museum’s director, commented in an interview that the attendance for the exhibit exceeded the museum’s expectations at 170,000 visitors. “Many expressed how much they enjoyed the intricacy, immersive quality, and joyful nature of the work,” he said.
Known as the “Princess of Polka Dots,” Kusama has had an illustrious career spanning seven decades. Her childhood in Tokyo was difficult, under the dark shadow of World War II and an abusive mother. From the age of ten, she started experiencing hallucinations that she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots.” These became the source both of her explosive creativity and her later mental illness.
From the age of ten, she started experiencing hallucinations that she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots.”
In 1957 at age 28, she moved to the U.S. to be free to make art the way she chose. Before she left her country, she burned one thousand of her artworks, a radical act to prepare for an entirely fresh start. She felt the art world in Japan was too conservative to contain her boundary-pushing spirit.
Making her way to the States, she planted the seeds of support and good luck for herself. She wrote blindly to Georgia O’Keeffe whose work she admired after she found it in a book from a secondhand bookstore. O’Keeffe liked Kusama’s work in return and mentored her, introducing her to her art dealer. Later, Kusama forged an important connection with the Minimalist artist Donald Judd when they had studios in the same building. And she also began an unconventional relationship with the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell, 26 years her senior and famous for his assemblages and collages, that lasted from the mid-1960s until his death in 1972.
If Not Art
Kusama’s first stop in the U.S. was in Seattle where she had her first show, and soon after she moved to New York City. There, in the 1960s and ’70s, she started to make a name for herself in the avant-garde art world, staging happenings and experimental performances, often protesting the Vietnam War. She spread her polka dot signature freely, sometimes using her body as a canvas and painting fluorescent polka dots on other naked women. Nudism brought notoriety. She also specialized in soft sculptures — once, for instance, filling an entire exhibit floor with stuffed, phallic-shaped pieces in red-on-white polka dots.
In 1973, she returned to Tokyo, planning on a short visit, but instead, she stayed. Losing her intimate friend Joseph Cornell had been traumatic and precipitated a breakdown. Afterwards, she began living in a mental health facility where she still remains. From there she walks to work in her nearby studio every day. She has reportedly tried to take her own life several times, and her first novel about her life in New York City in the ’60s reflects her fragility; it was called, “Manhattan Suicide Addict.” But making art is her salvation. She is often quoted as saying: “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.”
Her reputation in the U.S. waned for a couple of decades, but resurged around 2000, when she began creating her iconic Infinity Rooms, purposely built large chambers using an eclectic array of materials including mirrored glass, wood, aluminum, vinyl, rubber, plastic, acrylic balls and expansive swaths of LED lights to simulate vast starry skies. The installations’ eye-popping colors and playful dance of shapes make them instantly Instagrammable, helping her popularity skyrocket with a new audience in this century. Tickets to her exhibits sell out as if she were a rock star, and reverential visitors line up around the block to see the new work by this nonagenarian artist at museums around the world.
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Pumpkins and Mirror Rooms
One striking piece in the SFMOMA show that Kusama calls “Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, The Love in My Heart,” will be on display through October 2025. It’s an 18-foot elongated, five-stemmed pumpkin sculpture, in brilliant yellow, made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic. Its undulating walls are covered in an optical pattern of black dots, and the scale dwarfs and dazzles the many admirers who scramble around it.
Pumpkins seem to be kindred spirits for Kusama, a favorite motif like Monet’s haystacks or Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower petals. She came by this imagery naturally, as her parents owned a nursery and seed farm. Once, the story goes, she went to a big seed-harvesting farm with her grandfather and saw a pumpkin the size of a man’s head among the zinnias. “It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner,” she described in her autobiography. She started drawing pumpkins in elementary school and has embraced them as one of her favorite subjects ever since.
Another standout piece at the SFMOMA that will be on display through May 2025 is one of her celebrated Infinity Mirror Rooms, this one called “Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love.” The viewer stands in the middle of the mirrored room and sees dozens of suspended, neon-colored spheres in red, blue, yellow and green reflected to create the illusion of never-spending space. The installations are so popular that each observer is given only a couple of minutes to experience the work, but the impact is trippy, original and mind-expanding.
An Inner Sense of Wonder
Beyond the warm reception of international audiences to her lifetime of work, Kusama has recently been scrutinized and criticized for racist language in her autobiography of two decades ago. The criticism briefly threatened the SFMOMA show, but after the artist issued an apology — “I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book … the pain that I have caused” — the show went forward. SFMOMA Director Bedford explains that the museum continues to explore different ways to “present artists who are at once visionary and flawed; who create inspiring work but also have histories of harmful behavior or painful biases. Our goal as an institution is to engage in these difficult and complex conversations.” A public program in the spring explored the criticism and Kusama’s place in the canon.
Given this recent controversy and her history of personal angst, what sustains Kusama’s longevity as an artist well into her 90s? Bedford sums up her creative force this way: “Her work has always emerged from a deep inner sense of wonder, questioning and desire to express herself. As a result, it’s never been about prevailing trends or ideas, but rather an authenticity and uniqueness that have spurred its popularity. Many of her recent works, including her popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, tap into emotion and allow people to enter a different realm where they find their own joy, calm and inspiration.”
“I hope my work can make the world more peaceful,” Kusama said in the 2018 documentary about her life and art, “Kusama: Infinity.” In turn, making and sharing her artworks provide this gifted and complicated artist her own sense of peace.
