Yayoi Kusama, Visionary Artist Behind Iconic Polka Dots, Dies at 97

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots became one of the most recognizable visual signatures in modern art, died on Wednesday in Tokyo. She was 97.

Kusama spent more than seven decades creating work that moved between painting, sculpture, performance, film, and immersive installation—each medium bearing her unmistakable mark: the infinite repetition of small circles, the obsessive layering of pattern, the invitation to step inside a space where the boundary between self and artwork dissolved. Her infinity rooms, chambers lined with mirrors and dotted with lights or pumpkin-shaped sculptures, became destinations. Museums worldwide built waiting lists. People lined up for hours to spend ninety seconds inside.

She was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a city in central Japan, into a family of means. Her mother opposed her artistic ambitions with force. Kusama pursued art anyway, studying traditional Japanese painting before moving to New York in 1957 at age 28, armed with little English and no connections. She arrived during the height of abstract expressionism, a movement dominated by men, and she worked in near obscurity for years—painting, exhibiting in small galleries, performing in avant-garde happenings, pushing against the boundaries of what art could be and do.

By the 1960s, her polka dot paintings and soft sculptures began to gain attention. She created environments that viewers could enter and move through, works that challenged the separation between observer and observed. Her infinity rooms, which she began developing in the 1960s, became her signature achievement: spaces where mirrors reflected lights or objects infinitely, creating the optical illusion of boundless depth. Standing inside one was disorienting and meditative at once. The experience was personal, almost spiritual.

Kusama's work bridged Japanese and Western artistic traditions at a moment when such bridges were still being built. She drew on Japanese aesthetics—the appreciation for repetition, pattern, and the relationship between emptiness and form—while engaging directly with American minimalism and conceptual art. Her influence rippled outward. Generations of contemporary artists who came after her worked in the space she had opened.

She returned to Japan in 1973, settling in Tokyo, where she continued to create prolifically. She also wrote novels and poetry. Her work appeared in major museum retrospectives across Europe, Asia, and North America. The Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern—all mounted exhibitions of her paintings, sculptures, and installations. Her infinity rooms became among the most visited artworks in the world. Museums reported that demand for tickets to see them exceeded capacity by orders of magnitude.

In her later years, Kusama lived in a psychiatric facility in Tokyo, where she had voluntarily admitted herself decades earlier. She continued to work in a studio nearby, creating paintings and sculptures almost daily. She gave few interviews but remained engaged with her art until the end. Her output never slowed. Her vision never wavered.

Kusama's legacy extends beyond the art world. She changed how museums think about audience experience, about immersion, about the relationship between viewer and artwork. She showed that repetition and pattern could be profound. She demonstrated that an artist working outside the mainstream could eventually reshape what the mainstream valued. Her polka dots, once dismissed or overlooked, became iconic—reproduced on merchandise, referenced in fashion, recognized instantly by people who had never set foot in a museum. The dots were everywhere because Kusama had made them matter.