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

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 at a Tokyo hospital, her studio announced Thursday. She was 97 years old. Until her final days, she held a brush in her hand. The dots that had defined her life's work—those obsessive, proliferating circles that covered her canvases, filled her installations, and eventually adorned everything from Louis Vuitton handbags to ceramic teacups—never stopped flowing from her vision.

Kusama arrived in New York in 1957 as one of the first Japanese women to pursue art in America, a choice that required her to leave behind a family that wanted her to marry and wear kimono, not to paint. The city was in the grip of action painting then—dribbles, swooshes, the gestural violence of the Abstract Expressionists. She had dots. For years, she lived in poverty and obscurity, watching the art world celebrate everything but what she was making. She painted anyway. She kept painting dots.

By the late 1960s, she had begun staging "happenings," anti-war performances in which she covered people's bodies—and once a horse—with circles of paper. Some performances resulted in obscenity arrests. But they also brought attention. She befriended Andy Warhol, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Joseph Cornell, artists who recognized something radical in her refusal to abandon her vision. What others dismissed as repetitive, they saw as revolutionary. Kusama herself described the dots as she experienced them: hallucinations that had haunted her since childhood, a way of seeing the world that she had learned to translate into art. "Polka dots are fabulous," she said in a 2012 interview, wearing her signature orange bobcut wig and polka dot-covered clothes. "I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw. I will keep painting until I die."

Her work evolved into immersive installations—rooms lined with mirrors that created the illusion of infinite space, sculptures of twisting flowers, figures encrusted with macaroni that expressed her anxieties about food and the body. The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York exhibited her work. Major auction houses sold her paintings for millions. In 2016, Japan awarded her the Order of Culture, the nation's highest honor for artists. She accepted it with characteristic defiance, telling reporters she was still fighting, still giving everything she had so that people would remain interested in her art long after she was gone.

What made Kusama unusual was not just her artistic persistence but her willingness to make her vision available to the world beyond the gallery. She licensed her designs to fashion houses and consumer brands. Her polka dots appeared on T-shirts and key chains. She did not treat this as a compromise of her vision but as an extension of it—a way to bring her art to people who might never enter a museum. Late in her life, as the culture caught up with her, she became famous. She gave interviews. She read her poetry to reporters. She was soft-spoken and shy in manner, yet unabashedly bold in her assertions. In one moment she would declare herself an artistic revolutionary; in the next, she would admit: "I am so afraid, all the time, of everything."

She also made films and published novels. When asked where her ideas came from, she said she was not entirely sure. She simply picked up her brush and began. The process was mysterious enough that sometimes she surprised herself. "I think, 'Oh, I drew that? I was thinking that,'" she said. Her studio's statement on her death captured something essential: she had continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, continuing her exploration of what she called forever love and eternal soul. The dots, in all their vibrant psychedelic glory, had been her language for nearly seven decades. She had spoken it faithfully to the end.