Art world legend, friend to Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keefee, and arguably the most popular artist in the world, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room is the crème de la crème of experiential art. Pop stars from Katy Perry to Adele have entered her ethereal, neverending environments, which, the artist tells BOMB Magazine, “[originate] from hallucinations only I can see.” She elaborates, “I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings… I have been painting pictures since I was about ten years old when I first started seeing hallucinations.”
Whether it’s to connect with Kusama’s lifelong artistic struggle or to simply appreciate her aesthetic, visiting her installations can become a struggle in itself. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles employs a complex queuing system that requires visitors to reserve a one-minute time slot in Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room once they’ve entered the building. “Due to the limited capacity of the installation, not all visitors are able to experience it, as the queue for viewings usually books up early in the day,” the website warns.
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Those who don’t live near one of her current exhibitions have an even harder time experiencing Kusama’s work, as she hasn’t had a North American tour in 20 years. That’s about to change, though, as a chronological series of her infinity rooms will be traveling across the US and Canada starting in early 2017 and ending in the fall of 2018. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, will chart the artist’s growth through six mirrored installations, beginning with a replica of her breakthrough 1965 Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, and ending with All the Eternal Love I have for Pumpkins (2016). The show will begin at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC on February 23, 2017, then travel to the Seattle Art Museum (June 30 – Sept. 10, 2017), The Broad in Los Angeles (Oct. 2017- Jan. 2018), the Art Gallery of Ontario (March – May 2018), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (July – Oct. 2018).
For Instagrammers and shutterbugs the world over, it’s a profile picture dream come true. Chart Kusama’s evolution as an artist through these stunning pictures of her work:
See more of Kusama’s work on Instagram. Find your next favorite artist with The Creators Project on Instagram.
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