From her beloved dotted pumpkins to her immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms, artist Yayoi Kusama reenvisioned the pop avant-garde with artworks that often doubled as social commentary and public protest. Following this week’s news of her passing at the age of 97, artists, galleries, museums, and fashion houses around the world have taken to social media to reflect on the seismic loss.
Tributes from Louis Vuitton to professional doodlers have flooded Instagram, each remembering the artist as a daring, radical, and complex force. Across generations and disciplines, these 12 testimonies cement Kusama’s legacy in polka-dotted perpetuity.
Glenn Scott Wright
Reflecting on decades of friendship, teatime, and routine visits with the late artist, Glenn Scott Wright, president of the Victoria Miro Gallery, writes, “Spending time with Kusama will forever be one of the greatest privileges of my life, and her wisdom, humour and friendship will be a part of my own eternal soul.”
Dean Sameshima
Through old photographs of Kusama’s 1998 performance at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, Dean Sameshima recounts witnessing the artist’s thrilling, “tense” performance. Kusama would collect signature dots from audience members in this untitled number and stick them onto her fellow performers.
Katy Hessel/The Great Women Artists
British art historian Katy Hessel traces Kusama’s breaking from convention, captured in the small but mighty dot. “She showed us that all of those dots matter,” Hessel writes. “It takes every single one of them to light up in order to make up the cosmos, to make something beautiful; it requires us to work together.”
Museum Ludwig
The Museum Ludwig in Cologne concluded a major retrospective of Kusama’s work on August 2, just 12 days before the artist passed away. Over 480,000 people visited the five-month-long exhibition, the most successful in the institution’s history, according to David Zwirner gallery.
Sondra Meszaros
Calgary-based artist Sondra Meszaros pays homage to Kusama’s recurring philosophy of “Love Forever,” a phrase that would undergird dozens of the artist’s creations. Kusama routinely spread the love, passing out badges with the slogan to audience members at a 2012 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Louisiana Channel
The Louisiana Museum of Art’s video channel posted images of one of its founding editors, Christian Lund, greeting Kusama at eye level. The Louisiana Channel’s next newsletter will detail that exchange from Lund’s perspective, brief, powerful, and memorable as it was.
David Zwirner
“At the time of her passing, Kusama was, without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world,” writes David Zwirner, who represented the artist since 2013. Kusama had six solo exhibitions at Zwirner’s gallery, the latest being Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers in 2023, which drew lines down the block to experience one of her Infinity Rooms.
