{"data":{"id":"735","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":735,"topgoose_id":1882,"tms_id":735,"display_name":"Yayoi Kusama","sort_name":"Kusama Yayoi","display_date":"1929–","begin_date":"1929","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eBest known for her obsessive use of pattern and her immersive, large-scale environments, Yayoi Kusama has produced a diverse and distinctive body of work that encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, performance, film, and installation art. Kusama moved to the United States from her native Japan in 1957, and her series of \u003cem\u003eInfinity Net\u003c/em\u003e paintings—large canvases with endlessly repeated brushstrokes that anticipated the serial techniques of Minimalism and Conceptual art—catapulted her to the forefront of the 1960s New York avant-garde. Out of this practice grew a series of sculptures that feature everyday items she covered with similarly obsessional proliferations of repeated forms—what she called her “\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/16084\"\u003eAccumulations\u003c/a\u003e,” or sometimes “Compulsion Furniture.” Although often exhibited alongside works by artists such as \u003ca href=\"/artists/1384\"\u003eAndy Warhol\u003c/a\u003e and\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"/artists/964\"\u003eClaes Oldenburg\u003c/a\u003e, these sculptures distinguished themselves from their Pop art counterparts through their otherworldly quality and their connection with the artist’s childhood traumas and hallucinatory visions.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the “Accumulation” sculptures she began in 1961, Kusama roamed the streets of New York collecting outcast items—a sofa, a ladder, shoes, even a baby carriage and ironing board—that she covered with cotton-stuffed, white fabric forms she unabashedly identified as penises. The mass of soft-sculpture phallic forms that cover the curvaceous white-painted armchair in \u003cem\u003eAccumulation\u003c/em\u003e, at once alarming and absurd, reflects Kusama’s efforts to face her sexual anxieties, creating a kind of self-induced exposure therapy: “Reproducing the objects, again and again,” she has said, “was my way of conquering the fear.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, \u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 214.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":true,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500122518","wikidata_id":"Q231121","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:41:13.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-29T07:02:17.702-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/735/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/735/exhibitions"}}}}