Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese Artist Behind the Infinity Mirror Rooms, Has Died at 97

Yayoi Kusama—the pioneering Japanese artist, famed for her polka dots, pumpkins, Infinity Mirror Rooms, and Obliteration Room—has died at 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and her gallery, David Zwirner, announced her death on August 26; Kusama died in Tokyo on August 14.

​Born in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama moved to New York in the late 1950s and became a leading figure in the city’s avant-garde, working across painting, sculpture, performance, installation, literature, and poetry. Her work helped shape Pop and performance art, while her installations helped transform what we now call experiential art.

Kusama’s famous dots grew out of the hallucinations she experienced as a child. By the 1960s, she had turned them into an artistic philosophy she called "self-obliteration,” where covering a body, object, or room in repetitive patterns makes it dissolve into its surroundings and eventually, infinity. Early in her career, she staged the idea as a series of happenings around New York, painting dots onto nude participants in Central Park and, in 1969, in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, an unsanctioned performance (Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead) that landed her on the front page of the Daily News.

At the 1966 Venice Biennale, where she had not been invited to show, she set out 1,500 mirrored balls on the grass by the Italian pavilion, put up a sign reading "Your Narcissism for Sale," and sold them for $2 each until the Biennale shut her down.

The mirror became her signature material. Her first Infinity Mirror Room, Phalli's Field, opened in 1965 at the Castellane Gallery in New York, and the format eventually made her one of the world's most visited artists. When the Hirshhorn Museum's touring retrospective opened in 2017, it drew hours-long lines and became a social media sensation, ushering in the era of the art exhibit as a content-capture event. The Obliteration Room, first shown in 2002, turns visitors into artists, handing them sheets of colored dot stickers to gradually cover an all-white space until it disappears.

Kusama’s visual language also extended into fashion. She collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2012 under Marc Jacobs, covering the house’s bags like the Speedy and the Neverfull in her dots. In 2023, she followed it up with "Creating Infinity," a massive collaboration that spread her signature motifs across more than 400 items, including bags, clothing, shoes, and accessories. To celebrate the launch, a giant inflatable Kusama perched on the roof of Vuitton’s Champs-Élysées flagship seemed to paint dots down the façade, while an animatronic version of the artist painted spots onto the glass of the Fifth Avenue store's window.

In 1977, Kusama voluntarily moved into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, keeping a studio a short distance away where she worked almost daily for the rest of her life.

“My idea is to send the message of ‘love forever’ to all the people in the world through the polka dots, which are all about the universe and human beings and living things,” she told W while working on the magazine’s 2013 cover with George Clooney. “Your sex, being famous, being a star has nothing to do with it.”