Yayoi Kusama Kusama’s page
Works < >

Air Mail Stickers

1962

COLLECT

Yayoi Kusama, Air Mail Stickers, 1962. Collage on canvas, 71 1/2 × 67 1/2 in. (181.6 × 171.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. Hanford Yang 64.34

Yayoi Kusama covered the entire surface of this canvas with hundreds of air mail stickers, the labels that you put on the envelope when you are going to mail a letter overseas. In the early 1960s when she made this work, Kusama was living in New York City. Writing letters was the only practical way she could communicate with her friends and family in her homeland of Japan—before cell phones, email, or live chat! At that time, the glue on the air mail stickers had to be licked on the back so that they would stick to an envelope (or a canvas). They were not self-adhesive as they are today.

Airmail stickers similar to those that Kusama used to make this collage.

Kusama and Collage

“Even before I left Matsumoto for the USA I had been fascinated by collage and assemblage, pasting together bits of shredded paper or filling boxes with stones I had collected from the wide, stony bank of the river behind our house.”

−Yayoi Kusama

REPEAT AFTER ME

With Yayoi Kusama’s interest in repetition as inspiration, experiment with making an artwork using your own repeated image or symbol.

What you’ll need: paper, glue, and small, everyday objects that you can collect a lot of

Kusama used stickers she had around the house to make her artwork. Instead of stickers, find a type of everyday object that you have in your home. For example, you could use cotton balls, toothpicks, buttons, or dried macaroni!
Starting wherever you like, glue an object to the paper. Guess how many you’ll need to draw to fill the entire page. 100? 250? 1,000?
Now glue another one. Now glue another one, over and over. See if you can fill the whole page!
How many of your object were you able to fit onto one page? Try to count them.

Stuff other kids shared