By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist whose mirrored Infinity Rooms and polka-dot obsession turned museum-going into a pilgrimage, has died at age 97.
Her company confirmed the death earlier in August, saying it capped a life "devoted entirely to artistic creation," according to the BBC. No cause of death was disclosed in available reporting.
Kusama's career spanned more than seven decades, from the downtown New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s — where she staged happenings and rubbed shoulders with artists like Andy Warhol and Donald Judd — to a late-career global phenomenon that made her Infinity Mirror Rooms among the most Instagrammed art installations on the planet. Her signature pumpkins and polka dots became instantly recognizable shorthand for an artist who spoke candidly about living with mental illness and using art as both compulsion and refuge.
She returned to Japan in the 1970s and, for decades afterward, lived and worked by choice in a psychiatric facility in Tokyo, continuing to produce paintings, sculpture and installations from a studio nearby well into her nineties.
[Editor's note: further biographical detail — exact date and location of death, surviving family or institutional statements — was not included in the available wire material and should be confirmed for any expanded obituary.]
Tributes are expected from museums and collectors worldwide; Kusama's retrospectives regularly set attendance records from Tokyo to London to New York, and her market stood among the highest of any living artist at the time of her death.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon — here's which. This one's an easy call: the art world just lost one of its true originals.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
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