Yayoi Kusama

Air Mail Stickers
1962

Close-up of a textured fabric with a repetitive, intricate pattern of orange and white lines against a dark background.

Not on view

Date
1962

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Collaged paper on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 71 7/8 × 67 7/8in. (182.6 × 172.4 cm)

Accession number
64.34

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. Hanford Yang

Rights and reproductions
© Yayoi Kusama

API
artworks/2305

Made a few short years after Yayoi Kusama moved from Japan to the United States, Air Mail Stickers is a collage of the titular stickers, which read “VIA AIR MAIL.” Pasted onto paper in overlapping rows that both allow for readability and suggest the result of a formal, ordering principle, the red, white, and blue stickers produce the effect of accumulation from close-range and total coverage from afar. In this, Air Mail Stickers relates to the “allover” compositions of Kusama’s early abstract paintings, which were comprised of either dense polka-dot fields or infinitely expanding net forms.

Audio

August 21, 2015
Soyoung Yoon on Air Mail Stickers by Yayoi Kusama

In 99 Objects

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August 21, 2015
Soyoung Yoon on Air Mail Stickers by Yayoi Kusama

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Yayoi Kusama, Air Mail Stickers, 1962

In America Is Hard to See

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Yayoi Kusama, Air Mail Stickers, 1962

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Narrator: Air Mail Stickers has the physical presence of a painting. Its ground is a canvas, almost six feet square. Step back, and it seems like an abstraction—a jittery grid with jumpy cream-colored verticals and wavering red-and-black horizontals. Move closer, though, and this reading of the work becomes a kind of joke. As its title suggests, it’s a collage, covered in hundreds of airmail stickers. In the late fifties and early sixties it was not uncommon for critics to describe large-scale abstract paintings as “heroic.” By comparison, the act of applying stickers to a surface may seem simple, even childish. There’s something topsy-turvy about insistently repeating such a modest gesture. It’s anti-heroic—even comically dumb in its repetition—via air mail, via air mail—yet it’s intense and ambitious at the same time.
Yayoi Kusama was never part of any artistic movement. Yet she was on the forefront of more than one. Her early sculpture was in an exhibition of Pop art. And with its grid-like structure and one-thing-after-another construction, Air Mail Stickers anticipates Minimalism.