Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August 2026, at the age of ninety-seven. The news was made public only on 27 August. She had been born in Matsumoto, in the Nagano prefecture, on 22 March 1929, and for the last half of her life she had lived by choice in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, crossing the street each morning to a studio where she went on working.
Most of the obituaries will be about the dots, and they are right to be. But there is a reason her death belongs on this site rather than only on the art pages, and it happened on a lawn in Venice sixty years ago.
1966: the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion
Kusama was not invited to the 33rd Venice Biennale. She came anyway. On the grass beside the Italian Pavilion at the Giardini she laid out one thousand five hundred mirrored plastic spheres, each about the size of a football, and called the field Narcissus Garden. Then she stood in the middle of it in a golden kimono and sold the spheres to passers-by for two dollars each.
By her own account she had moral and financial backing from Lucio Fontana, and permission from the chairman of the Biennale committee to put the spheres on the lawn. What she had not asked permission for was the selling. The Biennale stopped her: it was not acceptable, she was told, to hawk art as though it were hot dogs or ice cream. She was removed, and she did not come back to the Biennale until 1993, when Japan gave her its national pavilion — the first time that pavilion had been given to a single artist.
The 1966 piece is usually filed under performance, or under the history of institutional critique, and it is both. But read from the Giardini it is something more specific: an outsider, a woman, a Japanese artist in a Europe that had not made room for her, pointing out that the world’s most prestigious art exhibition was also a market, and doing it by opening a stall. The mirrors did the rest. Fifteen hundred of them, on the grass, each returning the face of whoever bent over it, outside the pavilion of the host country.
The dots came first
Kusama had been seeing the world in repeated marks since she was about ten. She described them as hallucinations — fields of dots and nets that spread across a surface and then across everything, including her own hands. She began drawing to hold them still, in a house where her mother tore the paper out of her hands and set her to spy on her father’s affairs. The polka dot, she said later, came out of that: a way of making the vision belong to her rather than the other way round.
She took it to New York in 1958 and pushed it as far as it would go — the Infinity Nets, the accumulations of stuffed protrusions on furniture, the naked happenings, and eventually the Infinity Mirror Rooms, which put the viewer inside the hallucination instead of in front of it. She returned to Japan in 1973 and, from 1977, admitted herself voluntarily to the Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Why this page exists
Cultural Heritage Online documents places. Kusama does not have a monument here, or a house-museum, or a plaque; her work belongs to museums on four continents and to a foundation in Tokyo. What she has, in this atlas, is a lawn: the strip of grass at the Giardini where the Italian Pavilion stands, which for a few days in the summer of 1966 was covered in mirrors that nobody had authorised. Sixty years later, mirrored spheres on grass have become one of the most reproduced images in contemporary art, and the pavilion is still there.
Sources
- «Morta Yayoi Kusama, l’artista giapponese aveva 97 anni», Artribune, 27 August 2026 — for the death on 14 August, announced on 27 August, the birth at Matsumoto in 1929, the hallucinations from the age of ten and the years at the Seiwa Hospital.
- Wikidata Q231121 — for the dates of birth (22 March 1929) and death (14 August 2026), both recorded to the day.
- Public Delivery and Smarthistory — for Narcissus Garden at the 33rd Biennale: 1,500 plastic mirror spheres beside the Italian Pavilion, sold at two dollars each, the expulsion, and the return to Venice in 1993 at the Japanese Pavilion. The support of Lucio Fontana is Kusama’s own account, given in her autobiography.