Yayoi Kusama Timeline

Yayoi Kusama 29

1929 Yayoi Kusama born in Matsumoto Born Yayoi Kusama in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, into a family of merchants who ran a plant nursery and seed farm. Her childhood was marked by her mother's physical abuse and her father's infidelity — her mother would send her to spy on his extramarital affairs.
1939 First Hallucinations At the age of ten, began experiencing the vivid hallucinations that would define her art: flashing lights, fields of dots, and flowers that spoke to her. Patterns in fabric would come alive, multiply, and threaten to engulf her — a process she later called 'self-obliteration'. Her earliest known dotted artwork, a drawing of her mother's kimono covered in spots, dates from this year.
1942 – 1945 Wartime Factory Work At 13, was sent to work in a military factory sewing parachutes for the Japanese army during World War II. She later said she spent her adolescence 'in closed darkness', hearing air-raid sirens and watching American B-29 bombers fly overhead. The experience instilled a lifelong commitment to personal and creative freedom.
1948 – 1949 Kyoto School of Arts Studied nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting style, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. Grew frustrated with the conventions of Japanese art and became fascinated by European and American avant-garde movements.
1952 – 1955 Early Solo Exhibitions in Japan Staged several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo throughout the early 1950s, showing abstract natural forms in watercolour, gouache and oil paint. Began covering surfaces — walls, floors, canvases — with the polka dots that would become her trademark.
1955 Correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe Wrote to the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe seeking advice about pursuing an art career in the United States. O'Keeffe replied encouragingly, and the exchange gave Kusama the confidence to leave Japan. Before departing, she destroyed many of her early works.
1957 – 1958 Arrival in the United States Left Japan at the age of 27, having declared Japanese society 'too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women'. After a year in Seattle, where she exhibited at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, she moved to New York City.
1959 First New York Solo Show: Infinity Nets Held her first solo exhibition in New York at the Brata Gallery, showing a series of enormous white net paintings — canvases sometimes over 30 feet long, entirely covered in a hypnotic sequence of tiny loops. Donald Judd reviewed the show enthusiastically; both Judd and Frank Stella bought paintings.
1961 – 1963 Soft Sculptures and Studio with Judd and Hesse Moved her studio into the same building as Donald Judd and Eva Hesse, who became a close friend. Began creating 'soft sculptures' — ladders, shoes and chairs covered with white phallic protrusions. When she exhibited a phallus-covered couch at the Green Gallery in 1963, Claes Oldenburg soon began exhibiting similar sewn soft sculptures, causing Kusama great distress.
1962 – 1972 Relationship with Joseph Cornell Had a passionate, platonic relationship with the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, 26 years her senior. They called each other daily, sketched each other, and he sent her personalised collages. The relationship lasted until his death in 1972.
1963 First Infinity Mirror Room Created her first Infinity Mirror Room, a purpose-built room lined with mirrored glass containing scores of neon-coloured balls at various heights. Standing inside, viewers experienced the illusion of never-ending space — an expression of the cosmic self-obliteration she experienced through her hallucinations.
1966 Venice Biennale: Narcissus Garden Participated in the Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, an installation of hundreds of mirrored spheres laid out on a lawn. Dressed in a golden kimono, she began selling individual spheres for $2 each — a provocative critique of the art market — until Biennale organisers shut her down.
1967 – 1969 Happenings and Anti-War Protests Organised a series of provocative happenings in Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge and at the MoMA Sculpture Garden, painting polka dots on naked participants to protest the Vietnam War. Wrote an open letter to President Nixon offering to have sex with him if he would stop the war. The nudity scandalised her family in Japan; her high school removed her name from its alumni list.
1968 Kusama's Self-Obliteration Film Her collaborative experimental film Kusama's Self-Obliteration, showing her painting polka dots on everything around her, won prizes at film festivals in Belgium and the United States. In the same year, she opened a fashion boutique at Bloomingdale's and presided over one of the first gay weddings in New York.
1973 Return to Japan Returned to Japan in ill health, mentally and physically exhausted. The Japanese art world received her unsympathetically — one collector recalled thinking of her as a 'scandal queen'. She continued writing surrealistic novels and poetry but struggled with severe depression.
1977 Voluntary Admission to Psychiatric Hospital After further suicide attempts, voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she would live for the rest of her life. She established a studio a short distance from the hospital and was driven there each morning to work. 'If it were not for art,' she later said, 'I would have killed myself a long time ago.'
1978 – 1990 Literary Career Published prolifically from the hospital: a book of poems and paintings (1977), the novel Manhattan Suicide Addict (1978), and seven more novels through 1990, alongside her visual art practice.
1989 – 1993 International Revival A 1989 retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, organised by Alexandra Munroe, sparked a revival of international interest in her work. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with a dazzling mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures, re-establishing her on the world stage.
1994 Yellow Pumpkin on Naoshima A giant yellow pumpkin sculpture covered in black polka dots was installed on a pier on Naoshima Island in Japan's Inland Sea. The 2.5-metre-wide fibreglass work became one of the most photographed artworks in Japan and an icon of Kusama's pumpkin obsession.
2006 Praemium Imperiale Became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's highest honours for internationally recognised artists. Also received the Order of the Rising Sun in the same year.
2009 Person of Cultural Merit Designated a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government, one of the country's most prestigious cultural honours.
2012 Louis Vuitton Collaboration and Global Retrospectives Collaborated with Marc Jacobs on a line of Louis Vuitton products — leather goods, fashion, accessories and jewellery — covered in her signature dots, sold through pop-up shops worldwide. Major retrospectives opened at the Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in the same year.
2017 Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn and Kusama Museum Opens A 50-year retrospective featuring six Infinity Mirror Rooms opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, generating 34,000 Instagram posts and 330 million social media impressions — making her the defining artist of the Instagram age. In Tokyo, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened, dedicated to exhibiting her work.
2021 Cosmic Nature at the New York Botanical Garden Her exhibition Cosmic Nature at the New York Botanical Garden brought her immersive installations outdoors, with giant polka-dotted pumpkins and flowers set among the gardens. The Tate Modern in London also opened a permanent display of two of her Infinity Mirror Rooms.
2022 Auction Record Her 1959 painting Untitled (Nets) sold for $10.5 million, setting a new auction record. A second Louis Vuitton collaboration launched worldwide. The largest retrospective of her work in Asia opened at Hong Kong's M+ museum.
2023 Rockstar Album and Continued Work Released new exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. Publicly apologised for racist comments against Black people found in her earlier writings. Despite her advanced age, she continued painting daily at her studio across the street from the hospital.
2024 New Infinity Mirror Room in London Unveiled a new Infinity Mirror Room — Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart — at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, demonstrating that her creative powers remained undiminished at 95. Cyndi Lauper's farewell tour featured Kusama-designed sets and costumes.
2025 – 2026 Final Exhibitions Major exhibitions of her work opened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. A posthumous exhibition was already scheduled to open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in September 2026.
2026 Yayoi Kusama dies in Tokyo Died from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum confirmed she had continued to paint until her final days. Her representative David Zwirner announced her passing. She was, at the time of her death, the world's most commercially successful living artist and had been creating art for over seventy years.