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Reported on the opening of beloved artist Yayoi Kusama’s eponymous museum in her hometown of Tokyo.
Yayoi Kusama is having a moment. At 88, the Tokyo-based artist still works in her studio every day. And, given the demand for her polka-dot patterned pumpkins and glittering mirrored cube rooms she shows no sign of stopping.
Her prints, bulbous sculptures, and vivid paintings can be found in permanent museum collections from London to Los Angeles. Kusama’s immersive “Infinity Mirrors” retrospective kicked off this past February at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C, and is currently on a five-city North American tour. And, in October, an eponymous museum dedicated to Kusama’s work opened in Tokyo. The contemporary five-story tall building designed by Kume Sekkei resembles a glowing lantern and is located in the bustling Shinjuku neighborhood.
Born in 1929 and raised in the mountain town of Matsumoto, Kusama’s obsession with patterns began around the age of 10 when she started painting polka dots and net motifs in watercolors, pastels, and oils. Establishing herself as a working artist, she moved to the United States in 1957 and there she created large paintings, oversized soft sculptures, and staged events and demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War.
Lynn Zelevansky, curator, art historian, and most recently the director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, has worked with the artist and followed her career. “Kusama had a lot of ups and downs both in her career and her life. She left the U.S. in the early 1970s, and was back and forth between Europe and the States before returning to Japan full time in 1974. Once she left the U.S. and Europe, she really didn’t get back to visual work full steam ahead — although she wrote novels. She hit her stride again in the 1980s, and started to produce really good work then. She was well-known in Japan in the 1990s, but not outside of Japan,” explains Zelevansky.
In 1995, Zelevansky took up a post at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the first thing she did was to co-organize, along with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Kusama’s first big show in the United States. It opened in 1998 and traveled from LACMA, to the MOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before a version of it went to Tokyo.
At this point in her career a museum bearing Kusama’s name is not surprising to curators or devoted fans. Allan Schwartzman, co-founder of Art Agency Partners and chairman of Sotheby’s Global Fine Arts, was in Tokyo for an opening preview of the museum. “Kusama is certainly one of the most significant living artists. She is one of the truly innovative and individualistic artists of the last 60 plus years, and she’s an artist who has spent a lifetime exploring both a wide range of subject matter and also the range of possibilities to a rather narrow area and subject matter,” he says.
Describing the work at the inaugural show, ‘Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art’ which runs through February 25, 2018, Schwartzman explains, “She’s an artist of her own vision. She is someone who has always — or almost always — done things her way, and that has aided in foregrounding her vision for her work. She clearly has ideas beyond the object of how she wants them to be experienced or understood in the world.”
The inaugural exhibition features paintings from her most recent series, “My Eternal Soul”, as well as other new work, including black and white drawings, and, of course, a bright new pumpkin from her beloved signature series.
“Kusama has an all-encompassing inclusive vision for her work and it is a world. It’s a universe of her own making and that is the gathering place for all different parts of her creativity,” Schwartzman says. “So I can understand why she would want to seed the beginnings of a museum of her work in her own lifetime and I can also see why she would want to have a strong hand in how any museum that has her name on it would look.”
Zelevansky agrees, “That’s Kusama, that’s just her. She’s so amazing. She’s had so much success in the last few years, that this would only make her dream bigger. So she’s now made this museum happen.”
Reveling in this dream is now a possibility for those who visit this museum which is run by a foundation that Kusama founded. The museum hosts lectures, gallery talks, and rotating exhibitions from the artist. Guests are permitted for 90 minute visits, and tickets must be purchased in advance, so be sure to plan ahead as it does sell out.
For current exhibits and to purchase tickets visit yayoikusamamuseum.jp
Yayoi Kusama Museum, 107 Bentencho Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 162-0851 Japan