https://drive.google.com/open?id=1B0R6wOeWooHciZUWrA5d3HlAJr8g0hy4
Yayoi Kusama is an eccentric female artist with a polka dot obsession. She primarily works in sculpture and installation, but also works in painting, drawing, performance art, fashion and film. The movements she has been linked to include conceptual art, pop art, avante-garde, minimalism, surrealism, feminist art, environmental art, and performance art/happenings.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Japan in 1929, and from a very young age found herself repeatedly painting and creating polka dots. This became a fixation which has served her well for over 60 years. She attended the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, where she was trained in nihonga (traditional Japanese painting style), but she was really inspired by abstract expressionism. Kusama moved to New York City in 1958 and immersed herself in the hippie counterculture movement, fully embracing pop art and “happenings.” She gained public attention when she organized several happenings which involved nude participants covered in polka dots.
Her fixation on polka dots is connected to her understanding of the infinite. In an article written for npr by Elizabeth Blair entitled “Priestess of Polka Dots,” Kusama was quoted as having written, “Our Earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.” Everything she has done has involved her search into the infinite, from hundreds of polka dotted pumpkin sculptures filling a room, to another installation with large amorphous polka dot covered shapes, or one with hanging polka dot covered round lit features with mirrored walls to emphasize the infinite. In a 1960’s piece called, Phalli’s Field, an entire mirrored room was completely filled with hand sewn white with red polka dotted stuffed worm shapes which covered the floor of the installation. The audience could shuffle through them or even lay down amongst them. Trees in Singapore have been covered in her polka dots, and hundreds of other locations, as well. Kusama leaves her polka dotted mark wherever she goes.
She is a writer, as well, with materials which could be construed as a bit alarming to some. She has had long term battles with mental health, voluntarily committing herself to a mental institution in Japan for much of her later years of life, where she continues to produce her works. She has produced an enormous body of work when one looks back on her career, and continues to produce despite being 90 years old.
She epitomizes the “tortured artist,” yet she found her outlet and her manageable reality.