In her later years, as the times caught up with her art, she enjoyed fame. She signed on with fashion brands like Louis Vuitton, as well as licensed products like teacups, T-shirts, and keychains featuring her illustrations, including replicas of her likeness used in show windows and other marketing.
In 2008, Christie’s auctioned her work for $5.8 million. In 2016, she won the most prestigious award Japan gives its artists, the Order of Culture.
Upon receiving the award, she told reporters she was more determined than ever to pursue her art, stressing that the sincerity and devotion she had demonstrated in her personal life were crucial parts of her artistic legacy.
“I feel there is little left in my life, but I am now still fighting to the death for my art,” she said. “I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead.”
Categories were not enough to represent her art
Kusama was called pop, avant-garde, feminist, just to name some of the categories thrown at her, most of which Kusama brushed off as not quite representative of her art.
She was born into a middle-class family but felt misunderstood because her parents wanted her to simply get married. They wanted to buy her a kimono, not paints and brushes. She knew she had to get away. She chose America.
When she arrived in New York, the fad was “action painting,” characterized by dribbles, swooshes and smears, not dots. She suffered years of poverty and obscurity. But she kept painting dots.
She put circles of paper on people’s bodies, and once a horse, in “happening” anti-war performances in the late 1960s, which got some people arrested for obscenity but helped get media attention for her art. While in New York, she befriended artists such as Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Cornell, who praised her innovative style.
Over the years, Kusama made quirky but stunningly celebratory works like Macaroni Girl, a female figure plastered with macaroni, which expresses the fear of food; The Visionary Flowers, giant sculptures of twisting tulips, and Mirrored Corridor, a room with mirrors that delivers an illusion of a field of phallic protrusions speckled with dots.