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“If you had told me in 1989, when Yayoi Kusama was virtually unknown in the New York art world, no less internationally, that those same polka dots that she used to paint on random New York performing artists, on the Brooklyn Bridge, and for all her anti-war happenings at that time, that those same polka dots would be translated into the facade of the Louis Vuitton on 5th Avenue and 57th Street, I would not have believed it. But I’m glad it happened!” — Alexandra Munroe
This Sunday, March 22 marks the 91st birthday of the extraordinary artist and now cultural phenomenon Yayoi Kusama, who was born March 22, 1929. With lines around the block to see her famed Infinity Mirror rooms, driven in no small part by the ‘Instagramability’ of her work, it is all too easy to lose sight of her incredibly rich and diverse career. To shed light on Kusama’s career – from her earliest days as part of the counter-cultural New York City underground scene in the late ‘50s, through her anti-Vietnam-war protest happenings, to the modern-day – there is no better person to turn to than the foremost scholar on her work, Alexandra Munroe. Munroe is Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and in 1989 was the curator of Kusama’s first institutional solo show, at New York’s Center for International Contemporary Art. In this video from her Eyes on Fire series, Munroe speaks about the arc of Kusama’s career and her constant challenging of convention.
