Yayoi Kusama (22 March 1929 to 14 August 2026) was a Japanese artist, born in Matsumoto, who covered canvases, rooms and whole landscapes in polka dots. She is known for her Infinity Nets paintings, her mirrored Infinity Mirror Rooms and her dotted pumpkins. From 1977 she lived by choice in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital and painted until her last days. She died at 97.
People know her through what she built: a mirrored room where pumpkins seem to multiply without end, a yellow sculpture on a Japanese pier, a field of silver spheres. She traced all of it to something much smaller, a pattern she saw as a child.
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She was once thrown out of the Venice Biennale. In 1966 she was not on the program, so she laid 1,500 mirrored spheres on a lawn outside the exhibition, put on a gold kimono and offered them to visitors at two dollars each, beside a sign that read Your Narcissism for Sale. Police shut the installation down.
Twenty-seven years later she came back through the front door. In 1993 she represented Japan at the same Biennale, with a mirrored cube in which pumpkins covered in dots seemed to multiply without end.
Between the two Venices lay a hospital. From 1977 until her death she lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, a place she chose herself, and each morning she went to a studio nearby. She wrote that the only method she had found to relieve her illness was to keep creating art. The spheres, the pumpkins and the dots all came out of that routine.
What You'll Discover
What she saw as a child.
Who answered her letter.
What a critic paid for her canvas.
What she did on Wall Street.
Why she checked herself in.
The pumpkin the sea took.