Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was a Japanese avant-garde artist and novelist whose practice ranged from painting and sculpture to performance, fiction, poetry, and immersive installations. After moving to New York in 1957, she gained recognition for her Infinity Net paintings, soft sculptures, and mirror-and-light environments, developing a signature language of obsessive repetition and proliferation. Her major honors included Japan’s Order of Culture, awarded in 2016, and her Tokyo museum opened in 2017; she died on August 14, 2026, aged 97.