Image via Complex Original
Today Japanese artist and polka dot queen Yayoi Kusama turns 85. Over the past 60 years of creating work, the artist has skyrocketed to fame, showing works in international art fairs, museums, and galleries. Last Novemeber, she opened a blockbuster show of paintings and installations at David Zwirner gallery called "I Who Have Arrived in Heaven" that had lines around around the block to get into her two Infinity Rooms.
The mythology that has accompanied Kusama's ascent to fame and recognition is peppered with both trauma and triumph. From her abusive mother to her (almost unknown) lovers, Kusama's life continues to unfold even now. Celebrate the colorful artist's birthday with 20 Things You Didn't Know About Yayoi Kusama.
RELATED: The Most Important Artists of 2013
RELATED: Watch Yayoi Kusama Talk About Her New Exhibition "I Who Have Arrived in Heaven"
She didn't start with polka dots.
Kusama's painting career began with her training in Kyoto, Japan in the late 1940s. She started working in a classical style of calligraphic Japanese painting called Nihonga.
But once she started painting polka dots, they had a dark meaning.
Kusama's polka dots first appeared as hallucinations when she was 10 years old as a result of her tumultuous childhood. According to her autobiography Infinity Net, her mother was abusive; her father, a womanizer and mostly absent. Some feel that Kusama fictionalized the severity of her childhood visions to reaffirm her extreme art practice. Either way, the myth lives on.
At age 27, she wrote a letter to the president of France.
Her correspondence to President René Coty simply read, "Dear Sir, I would like to see your country, France. Please help me." Coty's response embraced Kusama's eagerness to study art and encouraged her to enroll in a cultural exchange program.
She was also pen pals with Georgia O'Keeffe.
After discovering O'Keeffe's paintings in a secondhand bookshop in her hometown of Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama traveled six hours by train to the American Embassy in Tokyo to look up O'Keeffe's address. She wrote a letter to the American artist that read, "Would you kindly show me the way to approach this life?"
And during the Vietnam War, she wrote to Richard Nixon.
In 1968 Kusama wrote a letter titled "Open Letter to My Hero Richard Nixon" about the Vietnam War, where she wrote, "Let's forget ourselves dearest Richard and become one with the Absolute, all together." Unfortunately the president refused the offer, and the war carried on.
When she finally moved to the US, Kusama travelled with unusual baggage.
Kusama lied to the Japanese government, saying that her first American show was complete, so that she could come to the US in 1957. To prepare for the trip, the (then) starving artist sewed money into her dress and tucked bills into the toes of her shoes. Then she boarded a plane to Seattle with 60 kimonos and 2,000 paintings.
But she didn't come to New York first.
After growing up in Japan, Kusama moved to Seattle in 1957 before arriving in New York City that same year. Her time in Seattle included a gallery show of her paintings at Zoe Dusanne Gallery.
Once in New York, she staged various "happenings" in the city.
After moving to New York City in 1957, her artistic practice blossomed to include public performative works carried out on the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park. These performance pieces were part of the many "happenings" going on in New York in the '50s and '60s, a term coined by Allan Kaprow that referred to the performance art popping up across the city.
One of Kusama's most well known happenings was a 1969 work, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MOMA, where Kusama painted her nude performers in polka dots in the courtyard of MoMA. Her other happenings ranged from commentaries on the Vietnam War to sexual liberation.
She created a naked painting studio/gay club.
In addition to the throngs of her nude followers demonstrating in front of the New York Stock Exchange and MoMA in the name of sexual freedom and social protest, Kusama also formed the Kusama Dancing Team out of a group of young gay men. Her most extreme (and poorly received) social experiment was the Kusama Omophile Kompany (kok), a naked painting studio/gay club.
And she carried out a Homosexual Marriage long before gay marriage was legal in New York City.
Though same-sex marriage was only considered legal in New York State on June 24, 2011, Kusama held a happening called Homosexual Marriage in 1968. Kusama presided over the union at 33 Walker Street in New York City, the location of her Church of Self-Obliteration.
Besides paintings and performance pieces, Kusama is also a filmmaker.
Kusama's most well known film is her 1968 work, Self-Obliteration. She produced and starred in the prize-winning film where her polka dots run wild, flowing from her two-dimensional paintings and then re-emerging on the bodies of models.
She's also an author.
Kusama's novels include Manhattan Suicide Addict, The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, The Burning of St. Mark's Church, Between Heaven and Earth, Woodstock Phallus Cutter, Arching Chandelier, Double Suicide at Sakuragazuka, and Angles in Cape Cod. She also wrote a book of poems and paintings, entitled 7, and contributed to several issues of the S&M magazine Sniper in collaboration with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
She has also worked as a designer.
Because of the recent upsurge in her international popularity, Kusama was invited to collaborate with Louis Vuitton in 2012. As a result of the auspicious partnership, Kusama was then asked to design the interiors for many of the high-end department stores carrying the line for the season.
Her avant-garde fashions have been sold at Bloomingdales.
In 1968, the artist founded Kusama Fashion Company Ltd., which appeared for a few seasons in Bloomingdale's in the aptly named "Kusama Corner" section.
Kusama, Donald Judd, and Eva Hesse were making art in the same building.
Working in close quarters with other famous artists prompted a close friendship between Hesse and Kusama who, in retrospect were both labeled as Post-minimalists.
Donald Judd and Frank Stella loved her work.
Both Judd and Stella purchased works from Kusama's first exhibition of paintings in New York in 1959. Judd, a critic for ARTnews at the time, reviewed the show with a great deal of enthusiasm: "the effect [of Kusama's Infinity Net] is both complex and simple. Essentially it is produced by the interaction of the two close somewhat parallel planes... at points merging at the surface... and at others diverging slightly but powerfully."
Kusama's longest intimate relationship was with artist Joseph Cornell.
Kusama and Cornell were known to have been an item (although their relationship was supposedly sex-less). In Kusama's retrospective held at London's Tate Modern and the New York City's Whitney Museum in 2012, three pieces featured in the exhibition were works dedicated specifically to Cornell.
She's the only person to ever be revered for an "artful pumpkin patch."
Gagosian Gallery writes the following in Kusama's bio on their website:
The success of her project for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993—a dazzling mirror room filled with pumpkin sculptures, like an artful pumpkin patch over which she presided in magician's garb—Kusama went on to produce a huge, vivid yellow pumpkin covered with an optical pattern of black spots as an outdoor sculpture. The pumpkin, like the infinity net, became a kind of alter ego for her.
Her work has sold for $5.7 million.
In 2008, Kusama's painting No. 2 sold for a record-breaking price for the artist at auction, $5,794,500 to be exact.
She has been making artwork longer than you've been alive.
Today Kusama turns 85, and she has been making art for 60 years (and counting).