Yayoi Kusama, who rose to art world stardom in her late 80s after decades of voluntary inpatient living at a Japanese psychiatric hospital, died at age 97 on Aug. 14. News of her death, at a Tokyo hospital, was announced on the artist’s website in a joint statement from her studio and Yayoi Kusama Inc on Aug. 27. The cause of death was multiple organ failure, according to her dealer, David Zwirner.
“Kusama’s art influenced the histories of minimalism, pop art, and performance art; more recently her large-scale installations single-handedly pioneered what is now referred to as experiential art,” the gallerist wrote in a statement. Her wide-ranging practice included painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, and installation art.
“The world has lost a truly revolutionary creative force,” Victoria Miro and Glenn Scott Wright, who have represented the artist in London for 30 years, said in their own statement. “Kusama’s singular artistic vision has transformed the landscape of visual art forever. Kusama was loved by millions of people across the world, and her art will leave a lasting and profound impact on humanity.”
Kusama first began showing her famed “Infinity Mirror Room” installations in the 1960s, building enclosures with mirrored walls (and eventually ceilings) that seemingly stretched on forever. The first one, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, debuted at New York’s Castellane Gallery in 1965, and was full of the artist’s soft sculpture: phallic, stuffed protrusions that were white with red polka dots. Many later iterations were dark inside, illuminated only by tiny colored lights seemingly floating in space, like a field of stars.
Throughout her life, Kusama was deeply engaged with the concept of the infinite, with much of her work defined by the impulse toward repetition. Her largest body of work—and her most expensive—is her “Infinity Nets” series. Her $10.5 million auction record, set in 2022, is for the 1959 painting Untitled (Nets). These canvases feature overwhelming fields of circular, almost cellular-looking blobs, which she said she made with the goal of covering “the entire world.” Kusama once claimed to have stayed up 50 hours straight working on these paintings.
“I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me,” Kusama said in the catalogue for her traveling retrospective, “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968,” which appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998 and 1999, respectively.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama had a troubled childhood. She was forced by her mother to spy on her father’s extramarital affairs, an experience that negatively colored her own views of sexuality. Her parents ran a rural plant nursery, and Kusama grew up in close proximity to nature. Both flowers and phalluses would become recurring themes in her art.
The hallmarks of her practice are intrinsically tied to her mental illness and the hallucinations of what she would describe as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots” that she began experiencing at just 10 years old. Many of Kusama’s works sought to translate into art the way such visions would engulf the artist; one of her memorable pieces, The Obliteration Room, invites visitors to place colorful polka dot stickers on each and every surface of an all-white room. Other recurring imagery in Kusama’s work included orbs, pumpkins, and tentacles—many of which have appeared in Infinity Rooms. Polka dots often decorate the aforementioned forms. Well-known pieces include Kusama’s anthropomorphized, tentacled sun, which became a balloon in the 2019 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
In 1948, Kusama briefly studied traditional Japanese Nihonga painting at the Kyoto City University of Arts, but she was drawn instead to the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement. Kusama wrote a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, expressing her admiration for the older artist’s work. O’Keeffe wrote back, and encouraged her to move to New York, which she did in 1958. Kusama became part of the downtown art scene alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Eva Hesse, and Donald Judd, who reviewed her 1959 New York solo debut as “original” and “advanced in concept” in ARTnews.
She began making her “Accumulation” works in 1962, affixing soft, phallic shapes like the ones in Phalli’s Field to the surfaces of everyday objects. Kusama also became known for her “Happenings,” staging naked performances in public places, her body covered only in polka dot body paint. In one 1968 piece, she officiated a marriage between two men dressed in a Kusama-designed dress for two with holes cut in intimate places. In 1969, she staged an unauthorized Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead in MoMA’s sculpture garden (“I did body painting while my models fucked a bronze sculpture by Maillol,” explained Kusama in a 2017 interview.)
Kusama also crashed the 1966 Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, a guerrilla art installation of 1,500 mirrored balls on the grounds of the Italian pavilion. The piece has since become one of Kusama’s most famous works, recreated in sites ranging from England’s Chatsworth House to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut to a dilapidated military warehouse on Rockaway Beach in Queens. (There’s also a permanent installation on the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.) But in Venice, Kusama sold the balls for about $2 a pop—prompting organizers to expel her from the show.
Kusama’s mental health took a turn for the worse, especially after the 1972 death of her platonic partner, the artist Joseph Cornell. She returned to Japan in 1973, leaving the bulk of her work behind. Much of it was lost, and the artist fell into obscurity in the years that followed—but she never stopped working, writing poetry and novels in addition to her painting, even after checking into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in 1977 for permanent treatment.
Few could have predicted Kusama’s late-career rise to fame. An elderly woman of color suffering from mental illness hardly seemed like the type of artist poised for worldwide recognition.
Then came 1989 retrospective at New York’s new Center for International Contemporary Arts organized by Alexandra Munroe, a leading curator of contemporary Asian Art. In 1991, for a Tokyo museum exhibition, Kusama made her first new Infinity Room in 25 years, Mirror Room (Pumpkin). The work invited viewers to enter a yellow room with black polka dots and peer inside a small box that seemingly contained an endless array of small, handmade pumpkin sculptures. Two years later, Kusama returned to Venice as Japan’s official representative at the Biennale, showing Mirror Room (Pumpkin) and reintroducing her Infinity Room concept to international audiences.
She would go on to rebuild the four original ones from her time in New York, and create over 20 variations on the concept. These kaleidoscopic installations transformed the artist into an unlikely social media sensation, prompting selfie-seeking hordes to line up for hours on end to visit Kusama exhibitions. Tickets to her sold-out museum shows have even attracted scalpers, trading at many times their face value. With the crowds came strict time limits for experiencing the artist’s work, with just 30 seconds allotted for each Infinity Room visit at her big shows.
A series of touring exhibitions lifted the artist from obscurity. A major retrospective appeared at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2011 and 2012, helping usher in widespread art-world adulation, including representation at Zwirner.
In 2017, the blockbuster traveling exhibition “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” debuted at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Featuring six Infinity Rooms, it smashed attendance records and increased membership by an astonishing 6,566 percent as would-be museum goers sought to secure coveted timed entry slots to the show. It went on to appear at the Seattle Art Museum, the Broad in Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, attracting long lines at each venue.
Kusama made few, if any, public appearances in her final years. She attended the opening of Tokyo’s Yayoi Kusama Museum in 2017 in a wheelchair, wearing the bright red bobbed wig that had become her signature. (The museum’s current exhibition, “Kusama’s Pop,” is on view through Aug. 30.) Her last trip to New York was in 2013, for her first Zwirner show.
But backed by the resources of a mega-gallery, Kusama and her studio continued debuting new works, and she is said to have continued painting until her final days. Many of her late pieces remixed the now-familiar elements of her work in new combinations—a giant pumpkin that had split open into tentacle-like forms at her 2021 New York Botanical Garden show, and an Infinity Room inside an Infinity Room, both filled with mirrored orbs, at Zwirner in 2017.
Against all odds, Kusama channeled her struggles with mental illness into a unique artistic vision that captivated audiences around the world. Her drive to create overpowered her demons, and allowed her to become one of the art world’s most beloved and instantly recognizable figures.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
How Bella Freud, Sigmund Freud’s Great-Grandaughter, Reinvented Psychoanalysis
The 15 Must-See U.S. Museum Shows in Fall 2026
Rosa Elena Curruchich Made Paintings Small Enough to Smuggle. Now, They’re Seeing the Light.
Does Gen Z Have the Patience for Fine Dining?
WAG-onomics: How Women Took Over the Business of Men’s Sports From the Sidelines
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
