Yayoi Kusama Rules the Pop Art World

Is Yayoi Kusama part of pop art?

The Guggenheim, which features the artist’s work heavily in the new exhibit “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now,” says yes.

Welcoming Kusama’s “INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE (2019)” and one of her “Infinity Net” paintings to the Guggenheim, which recently celebrated the 20^th anniversary of its Asian Art Initiative, is a thrill for Alexandra Munroe, the museum’s senior curator at large, global arts. Munroe is considered one of the most significant Kusama scholars and curated one of the artist’s first major shows in New York City.

“She has such a variety of work. She’s not just a painter. She paints. She’s not just a sculptor. She does sculpture. She’s an environmental artist. She’s a filmmaker,” Munroe says of Kusama, who is now 97. Kusama, she feels, was for decades left out of the canon of American art. “She’s been a woman in a society that has sidelined her. She’s been someone who’s neurologically diverse in a society that didn’t understand that. She was ridiculed in the New York art world by artists who were violently jealous of her and didn’t fully take her seriously. She has a lot to be upset by, but her art is not about rage ever.”

Ahead of the opening of “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now,” Munroe spoke to ELLE about Kusama’s legacy, her wildly popular mirror rooms, and why her work defies categorization.

How did the Kusama pieces become part of “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now?”

I can’t take any credit for bringing this Kusama mirror room to “Guggenheim Pop,” but I certainly supported the idea when it was first presented. Kusama is not automatically considered a pop artist. I have argued that what makes her so interesting is she anticipated many different movements but resisted any categorization or alliance with any of them. That said, she did show with Andy Warhol as early as 1962, but she wasn’t in any of the early pop shows at all.

Even though she was incredibly famous, and in 1968 garnered more press than Andy Warhol, when it came time for the established writers and critics and art historians to write a history of the decade in pop, she was largely excluded. I’ve been credited for reminding the world of her extraordinary art historical importance across many different dimensions, including pop art, but also abstraction, eccentric abstraction, happenings, feminism, experimental film, and what has come to be known as psychically driven art, a sort of form of late surrealism. [Her work] can belong in pop, but it could equally belong in 17 or 18 other contexts. That multiplicity of meaning is part of what makes Kusama’s art so important. It’s never one thing only. There are multiple contexts that we can read into it.

She’s not making pop art as a critique of commodity culture. That is exactly what Warhol was doing, adapting the aesthetics and the practices and the graphics of pop art and bringing it into the gallery floor. That kind of criticality was never part of her practice. But she took other forms of the aesthetic, the lights, the drama.

Do you have any thoughts on why there has been such an increase in interest relatively recently?

I think there’s been an increase starting in 1989 with “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” the show I guest curated at the Center for International Arts. That show alone was very influential. A lot of the artists who knew her were still alive and came, like Donald Judd and Frank Stella. She had not come to New York since she left in 1973. So, it was a huge event for her to come back. We did all of the original research in tracking down these works that are now iconic and in museum collections, that at the time were sitting in people’s garages and living rooms and in her studio in Tokyo.

After that, it just took off. The Japanese critic Akira Tatehata was inspired by our show and the catalog, which was a huge argument of her importance, in the American, European, and Japanese art historical context. He has credited the show with being the inspiration for recommending her for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993.

LACMA did an exhibition, and then MoMA did an exhibition. I would say by the late ’90s, she had every gallery lining up to show her work and an incredible international exhibition history now in full gear.

I think the Kusama boom has been very steady. Some artists get very famous, but they don’t stay famous with younger generations. They get locked into a generation or two. In her case, younger artists continue to flock to her, and younger Japanese artists continue to flock to her, so she has extremely broad appeal. Mika Yoshitake curated the 2017 show “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Hirshhorn Museum. That show toured to several sites and the book became very, very popular.

I don’t think it’s any one thing [that’s kept her in the spotlight]. I think there’s been a perfect storm, but what’s extraordinary is that the conditions for this storm have not stopped. It’s a constant.

How do you think these pieces work with the pieces from other artists in the exhibition?

Kusama was neck and neck with Warhol as a competitor, actually. Before Warhol, she was the first to do a repetitive image and turn it into wallpaper and create an environment in the room. She took a photograph of a boat and lined the gallery walls with a repetitive serial image of that boat, which was itself displayed and covered with these barnacles of protruding phalli forms. She posed naked in that environment for a whole series of photographs that also became part of that installation and exhibition. And Warhol’s cow wallpaper came directly after that.

Kusama presented her first peep show, “Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field,” at Castellane Gallery in 1965, months before Lucas Samaras presented his mirrored room at Pace Gallery. I don’t think Lucas Samaras was so happy about [that fact being pointed out], but that’s the kind of research that we had to do in 1989 for the show to prove over and over again that Kusama actually did it first.

All these canonical “original art breakthroughs” that came to define so many of the key movements of the decade had been ascribed to white men. Kusama was downtown in the mix, showing with them, partying with them, sharing buildings and studios with them. She was absolutely very, very active and present in the downtown art world at that time and everybody knew her.

I think I was the first Western curator to really discover her archives, which at that time were not archives. They were just masses and masses of everything she brought back to Japan from New York in shoe boxes, in hat boxes, in old-fashioned suitcases that were slapped with polka dots and Pan Am stickers from trips to Amsterdam and Venice. They had not been opened in over 25 years. Reiko Tomii, a Japanese art historian and curator based in New York, and I were really the first to sort through them. She kept every shred of publicity that she ever got.

What do you hope that somebody who sees Kusama’s work in the show comes away understanding?

First of all, the sheer ambition and originality of her vision and her capacity to manifest it in five dimensions, including time. It is a spatial experience, it’s visual, it’s aural. It’s a complete sensorial work. It’s not an object that just sits on the wall and depicts reality or critiques society. It is all-enveloping. As we enter this space, we enter her brain. This comes from later Kusama. She started to introduce this idea into her infinity mirrored rooms, which is what she calls the undifferentiated self. We see ourselves exploding like millions and millions of atomic cells down to a cellular level. It’s an experience of dissolving ourselves into a wider and bigger environment.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now

This new exhibition brings together historic artworks and recent acquisitions from the Guggenheim New York collection, including Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Soft Shuttlecock, alongside one of Yayoi Kusama’s immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms

1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
05 June – 10 Jan, 2027
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