Yayoi Kusama made a lot out of a dot. Across a career that spanned more than seven decades, the Japanese artist turned it into paintings, rooms, clothes, and eventually an image recognized around the world. Today, the Yayoi Kusama Museum announced that she passed away at the age of 97.
Fittingly, she continued painting until her final days. Kusama spent her life following ideas wherever they took her, even when the destination was strange, provocative, or entirely uncharted.
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Yayoi Kusama’s Art Began With What Only She Could See
Kusama had once said that hallucinations followed her since childhood, sharing that patterns multiplied across her surroundings and flowers spoke to her. At times, she felt herself disappear into what she saw.
She eventually gave those experiences somewhere to go. After she arrived in the United States in 1957, her Infinity Net paintings filled vast canvases with repeated loops. Her Accumulations of the early 1960s covered furniture with hand-sewn phallic forms, which she connected to her fear of sex. Then came Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field in 1965. Mirrors sent hundreds of stuffed forms toward apparent infinity and invited everyone else into a vision that had once belonged to her alone.
Before Louis Vuitton, Yayoi Kusama Designed Her Own Clothes
A canvas was never going to contain Kusama for long. By the late 1960s, her New York happenings had brought nudity and body painting into her practice. Clothes soon received the same irreverent treatment.
Her Orgy and See Through dresses of 1968 came punctured with circular openings that exposed the body underneath. Other designs accommodated multiple people at once. Her soft phallic sculptures also found their way onto dresses. As she was very active in the counterculture movement of that time, she wasn’t interested in conventional dressing.
Kusama then established the Kusama Fashion Company in 1969, sold her ready-to-wear through American retailers, and opened a New York boutique. She dressed herself in her creations, too, until artist, artwork, and outfit appeared to dissolve into one another.
Decades later, Japanese designer Issey Miyake invited Kusama to work with him in 2000. Collaborations with Louis Vuitton followed in 2012 and 2023, which sent her dots across clothes, accessories, and stores worldwide. By then, the radical artist who sold experimental dresses in 1960s New York had become a global phenomenon.
Yayoi Kusama’s Originality Was Never Just About the Dots
The strange thing about originality is that once it exists, it can look deceptively easy. Anyone can make a dot in different hues, and Kusama’s work has since become familiar enough to reference and reproduce. What cannot be reverse-engineered are the exact conditions that made her see things the way she did in the first place. No one probably should, as she was candid about struggling with her mental health from her difficult upbringing.
There’s a leap there that also requires vulnerability: the willingness to take an idea seriously before anyone can assure you it will work or even make sense.
For 97 years, Yayoi Kusama saw possibilities where others saw blank space. We are richer for having seen where they led.
Photos: LOUIS VUITTON and YAYOI KUSAMA MUSEUM (via Instagram)
Frequently Asked Questions
The Yayoi Kusama Museum announced that the Japanese artist passed away at age 97. She reportedly continued painting until her final days, closing out a career spanning more than seven decades.
Kusama is best known for her polka-dot motifs and Infinity Mirror Rooms, immersive installations using mirrors to create the illusion of endless repeated forms, beginning with Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field in 1965.
Yes. Kusama designed her own experimental clothing line starting in the late 1960s, including the punctured Orgy and See Through dresses of 1968, and founded the Kusama Fashion Company in 1969 with a New York boutique.
Kusama collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2012 and again in 2023, bringing her signature dot motifs to clothing, accessories, and stores worldwide, following an earlier collaboration with designer Issey Miyake in 2000.
Kusama said hallucinations followed her since childhood, with patterns multiplying across her surroundings and flowers appearing to speak to her. She channeled these experiences into her Infinity Net paintings after arriving in the US in 1957.
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