Yayoi Kusama
Air Mail Stickers
1962
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
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.
