The World Will Always Have Yayoi Kusama’s Dots
There are artists whose work you admire, artists whose work you collect, and then there are the very rare artists who somehow become part of the way you see the world.
Yayoi Kusama was one of those artists for me.
The news of her passing at 97 feels strange because Kusama spent so much of her life making art about infinity. Infinity rooms. Endless reflections. Repeating patterns. Pumpkins covered in dots. Entire spaces transformed until it was difficult to tell where the artwork ended and the world began.
Maybe that is why it is hard to think of her work ever really ending.
I have collected pieces of Kusama’s work over the years, and I’ve always loved what she represented. There was something unmistakably hers about everything she created. You didn’t need to see a signature in the corner. You knew.
The dots told you.
The colors told you.
The repetition told you.
A Kusama could be playful and joyful from across a room, and then become something far more complicated when you stood in front of it long enough.
But strangely, one of the things that has made me appreciate Kusama most isn’t hanging on a wall.
It’s a children’s book.
We have a book called Artsy Cats, which introduces famous artists through cats inspired by their work. And, naturally, there is “Yayoi Catsama.”
My daughter loves it.
She loves the dots. She recognizes Kusama’s art. There is a wonderful innocence in watching a child encounter those colors and patterns without knowing anything about auction prices, museum retrospectives, art history, critics, movements or the enormous cultural significance of the woman who created them.
She just knows that she likes the dots.
And I’ve come to think there is something incredibly beautiful about that.
Because great art shouldn’t only belong to museums, collectors or critics. The greatest art somehow escapes all of those boundaries.
It finds people.
Kusama’s work found generations of people who might otherwise never have cared about contemporary art. People stood in line for hours to spend moments inside her Infinity Mirror Rooms. Children were captivated by her pumpkins. People who couldn’t name five contemporary artists could recognize Kusama immediately.
She made avant-garde art accessible without making it ordinary.
That is extraordinarily difficult.
And she did it while remaining completely, uncompromisingly herself.
Her life story makes that accomplishment even more remarkable.
Kusama left Japan for New York in the late 1950s and entered an art world that was hardly designed to welcome a young Japanese woman with radical ideas. She worked in the orbit of artists who would become some of the biggest names of the twentieth century, experimented constantly, challenged conventions and developed ideas that would eventually become instantly recognizable around the world.
Recognition did not always come easily or quickly.
Yet she kept creating.
Through obscurity, recognition, struggle, rediscovery and eventually worldwide fame, she kept creating.
She painted.
She wrote.
She sculpted.
She created environments.
She covered rooms in mirrors and lights.
She covered pumpkins in dots.
She covered the world in dots.
And according to her studio, she was still painting until the final days of her life.
There is something enormously moving about that.
Ninety-seven years old and still holding the brush.
For someone whose work returned again and again to ideas of eternity, repetition and infinity, perhaps there could be no more fitting final chapter.
I’ve always thought one of the great privileges of collecting art is realizing that you don’t really possess art in the traditional sense.
You get to live with it for a while.
You become one person in its story.
Someone imagined it. Someone created it. Someone stood before it before you did. Someone will probably stand before it long after you are gone.
And occasionally, if you’re lucky, you get to pass that appreciation down.
That’s what I think about now when I think about the Kusama pieces I’ve collected.
Someday my daughter may understand who Yayoi Kusama was in a completely different way.
She may learn about the New York art world of the 1960s. She may learn about the obstacles Kusama faced. She may study the Infinity Nets, Narcissus Garden, the pumpkins and the Infinity Mirror Rooms. She may understand the enormous influence Kusama had on contemporary art.
Or maybe she’ll simply remember sitting with her dad and laughing about Yayoi Catsama.
Either one would be enough.
Because that, too, is a legacy.
An artist born in Matsumoto, Japan, nearly a century ago created a visual language so powerful that decades later a little girl can look at a page in a book and know exactly whose world she has entered.
Dots.
Dots everywhere.
Dots disappearing toward infinity.
There are very few people who leave behind something that unmistakable.
Yayoi Kusama did.
The art world lost one of its true originals. Collectors lost an icon. Japan lost one of its greatest cultural figures. And the world lost someone who spent nearly a century proving that an individual imagination, pursued relentlessly enough, can eventually become universal.
But somewhere there will be another child walking into an Infinity Room for the first time.
Another person standing in front of one of those magnificent pumpkins.
Another collector staring at a canvas and discovering something new in a pattern they have already looked at a thousand times.
And in my house, there will still be a little girl pointing to a page in Artsy Cats and recognizing Yayoi Catsama.
That makes me smile.
Maybe that’s the appropriate way to remember an artist like Kusama—not simply with sadness that she is gone, but with gratitude that she was here.
Thank you, Yayoi Kusama.
Thank you for the pumpkins.
Thank you for the mirrors.
Thank you for the infinity.
Thank you for giving generations of adults and children permission to see something magical in something as simple as a dot.
And thank you for leaving enough of them behind to cover the universe.
Rest in infinity.