Yayoi Kusama is one of the most influential and widely-collected artists of the 1960s and quite possibly Japan's premiere artist of the modern era. Critics have variously ascribed her work to minimalism, feminism, obsessivism, surrealism, pop, and abstract expressionism. One thing for certain is that it has been a long and strange journey for Kusama, who is 74 in 2004.
Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama remembers growing up "as an unwanted child of unloving parents." A penchant for drawing and painting led Kusama to plot her escape with the help of art magazines, and after sewing black-market American currency into the seams of her clothes, Kusama fled Japan in search of her hero, Georgia O'Keeffe.
She arrived in New York in 1958 and began to create a life for herself as an artist. Kusama made the front page of the New York Daily News in August, 1969, after infiltrating the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden with a bunch of naked co-conspirators to perform her "Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead."
