Birth Anniversary: Yayoi Kusama — March 22, 1929

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, in the Nagano prefecture of Japan, on 22 March 1929. She died on 14 August 2026, at ninety-seven.

The place pinned to this anniversary is not her birthplace: it is the lawn at the Giardini in Venice, beside the Italian Pavilion. That is where Kusama enters this atlas. In 1966, uninvited to the 33rd Biennale, she laid out 1,500 mirrored spheres on the grass there, called the field Narcissus Garden, and sold them to visitors for two dollars each until the Biennale expelled her. She returned to Venice in 1993, with the Japanese Pavilion to herself.