Yayoi Kusama (Photo credit: David Zwirner Gallery)

By Holland Cotter

Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist whose polka-dot-covered paintings, phallic sculptures and public performances caused a stir in New York City and Europe in the 1960s, and whose mirrored “Infinity Room” installations became selfie sensations and blockbuster museum and gallery attractions in recent decades, died on Aug. 14 in Tokyo. She was 97.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation announced her death, at a hospital, on Thursday.

Ms. Kusama first gained attention in the late 1950s and early ’60s with immense abstract paintings that she called “Infinity Nets.” They were composed of countless small, curving strokes of paint on all-white or all-black surfaces, suggesting a giant, swirling mesh pierced with pinprick holes.

Far larger in scale than the Abstract Expressionist works that were then dominating New York galleries, her pieces quickly attracted the notice of young artists who were trying to take American art in new directions. One was Donald Judd, who was working at the time as an art critic and formulating what would become Minimalism. He bought a painting, helped out in her studio and began championing her work.

Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin on Naoshima (Photo credit: Anthony Shaw – stock.adobe.com)

Creating art incrementally from repeated components became Ms. Kusama’s mode of working, and she applied it to sculpture as well. In the early 1960s, she began sewing thousands of stuffed fabric phalluses, painting them white or gold and gluing them onto the surfaces of everyday objects — tables, armchairs, coats, shoes, a baby carriage, a rowboat — to create bristling, room-filling installations.

These “Accumulation Sculptures” made their debut, along with work by Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, at a group show at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962. It was among the first exhibitions of Pop Art, and with it, Ms. Kusama was recognized as a pioneer in the two major avant-garde styles of the day, Pop and Minimalism.

To read the entire article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/arts/yayoi-kusama-dead.html