Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生, Kusama Yayoi; 22 March 1929 – 14 August 2026) was a Japanese artist who worked primarily in sculpture and installation. She was also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work was based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She was acknowledged as one of the most important artists to have come out of Japan, and was one of the world's top-selling female artists and ranked #19 in Sotheby's 2023 list of the top 50 artists. Her work influenced her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts for a year in a Japanese painting style called nihonga. She was inspired by American abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. She experienced a period in the 1970s during which her work was largely overlooked, but a revival of interest in the 1980s brought her art back into public view. Kusama continued to create art in various museums around the world, from the 1950s onwards.

She was open about her mental health and resided in a mental health facility from the 1970s until her death. She said that art had become her way to express her mental problems. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art", she told an interviewer in 2012. "I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."