Yayoi Kusama, Avant-Garde Pioneer Who Found Fame Late, Dies at 97

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14, 2026, at a Tokyo hospital. She was 97 years old. The news arrived as a quiet confirmation of what her company already knew: that a life had ended, one devoted entirely to making art.

She had lived in a psychiatric facility for decades, a choice she made herself. In photographs, she wore a bright-red wig and polka-dot ensembles—a visual signature so complete it became inseparable from her identity. But the woman inside that costume had spent most of her life invisible to the world that would later celebrate her.

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a rural town in Japan's Nagano region. As a child, she experienced hallucinations—flashing lights, embers, patterns that bloomed across walls and ceilings without warning. She saw a tablecloth with red flowers and watched that same pattern multiply across the room, covering the windows, the pillars, her own body. Rather than flee from these visions, she would spend her life trying to translate them into something others could see. Her family did not support her decision to study painting in Kyoto. They told her that her art brought shame.

In the 1960s, Kusama moved to New York, where the art world was almost entirely controlled by men. She exhibited sculptures—phallic forms, fabric couches—and performed nude. She created her "Infinity Mirror Rooms," installations where mirrors and lights created the illusion of endless space. Millions of people would eventually visit these rooms. But in that moment, in that masculine-dominated scene, her work was poorly received. Worse, she watched as male contemporaries—Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras—took ideas that resembled hers, refined them, and saw their versions displayed in prestigious galleries while hers were overlooked. The theft was not always direct, but it was unmistakable. She became distressed. She felt dejected and distraught. After years of this, she returned to Japan.

She found a psychiatric hospital willing to treat her, a place where the doctors understood art therapy. She checked herself in voluntarily and remained there for the rest of her life. But the hospital became a studio. She continued to paint. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, her work grew darker—collages that engaged with natural cycles, with mortality, with the texture of living. In 1966, she had shown up uninvited to the Venice Biennale and laid 1,500 mirror balls on the ground. Twenty-seven years later, in 1993, Japan sent her as its first solo artist to represent the country at the same event. The exhibition transformed how she was perceived. Museums began to show her work. In 2001, she received the Asahi Prize, recognizing her contributions to Japanese culture and art.

By her 80s and 90s, Kusama had become one of the world's most recognizable artists. Her polka dots and pumpkins—the pumpkin, she said, spoke to her, embodied stability and peace—became iconic. In 2022, one of her paintings sold for $10.5 million at auction, making her among the highest-earning female artists in the world. Luxury brands collaborated with her. Museums mounted major exhibitions. Social media amplified her image: her bold shapes and shiny steel orbs became backdrops for selfies, for poses, for the kind of casual fame that comes from being everywhere at once.

She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush. The company that represented her said she had pursued "an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry." It was a formal way of saying that she had spent nearly a century translating her inner world into forms that others could enter, could stand inside, could understand. The hallucinations that had terrified her as a child had become the language through which millions of people experienced beauty and infinity.