Floor By Floor: The Yayoi Kusama Museum
By Peter Augustus Owen
Exterior of the Yayoi Kusama Museum. Photo by
It has been a busy year for Yayoi Kusama, the energetic 88-year-old grande dame of the Japanese art scene who has a penchant for dots and pumpkins. The traveling Infinity Mirrors, after opening at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in February, went on to stop at the Seattle Art Museum, The Broad in Los Angeles, and will continue its tour well into 2018. “My Eternal Soul” was mounted at The National Art Center, Tokyo, where the artist made an appearance for photo ops and even gave a speech (read from a dot covered binder). “Life Is the Heart of a Rainbow” opened at the National Gallery Singapore this summer, and then toured to the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The Dallas Museum of Art is currently exhibiting “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins.” And then there were countless solo and group presentations in commercial galleries and art fairs worldwide. But the crowning achievement for Kusama was the opening of a museum bearing her name, which she calls “the greatest inspiration of my entire life” in a public letter titled “A Message of Love for My Beloved Humankind.”
