Yayoi Kusama, visionary artist of infinite dots and dreamscapes, dies at 97

Yayoi Kusama, who transformed personal anguish into infinite wonder through polka dots and mirrored chambers, died on August 14 in Tokyo at the age of 97. Born into wartime Japan and haunted from childhood by hallucinations she could not silence, she chose to paint them rather than flee them — and in doing so, gave the world a new way of seeing itself inside the cosmos. Her life was a testament to the strange alchemy by which suffering, when met with relentless creative will, can become something that multiplies endlessly outward.