“A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless, and unknowing. Polka-dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement... Polka-dots are a way to infinity.” (1)

At around the age of 10, Kusama began to hallucinate spots that covered everything around her: the furniture, walls, ceiling, as far as the eye could see. As a child, she drew these visions and has continued to do so throughout her career. Her work is dominated by repetitive, almost compulsive mark-making, with polka dots becoming her trademark. The artist has explained that her practice serves as a kind of “art-medicine,” saying, “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.”(2) This sculpture combines the artist’s iconic polka dots with her longstanding interest in pumpkins that likely stems from the nursery her family ran in Matsumoto, Japan. The polka dots on its surface can be read alternatively as lighthearted as Minnie Mouse’s dress or as menacing as a skin disease. It looks as if it could have been plucked from a Tim Burton film, a Surrealist painting, or Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  

In the 1950s, Kusama was an active member of avant-garde art circles in New York, befriending art world luminaries including Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Joseph Cornell. Georgia O’Keeffe was a friend and early mentor. Between 1958 and 1973, she staged Happenings and created Accumulation sculptures of fabric phalli that cover the surface of everyday objects (four of these sculptures are in the Art Center’s collection). But by the early 1970s, she was in dire financial straits and on the precipice of a breakdown. She returned to Japan and, in 1977, voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She has lived there ever since, maintaining her art practice in a studio nearby.  

(2) Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. by Ralph McCarthy (London: Tate Enterprises, Limited, 2013), 93.