The Dallas Museum of Art jointly acquired All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins in 2017 with the Rachofsky Collection, which is also based in Dallas. Like other entries in the series, viewers are invited to step inside a small mirrored room filled with Kusama’s whimsical, often polka-dotted sculptures, in this case, her signature yellow and black pumpkins. The effect is a kaleidoscopic sea of sculptures stretching into oblivion—very selfie-friendly. 

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is “key to understanding [Kusama’s] practice,” Gavin Delahunty, a contemporary-art curator at the museum, said in a statement in 2017.

Due to its popularity, the installation comes with a recommendation of one to four visitors at a time, though that didn’t prevent property damage during its stint at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. In a headline-grabbing 2017 incident, a visitor tripped on one of the hand-painted acrylic gourds, shattering it in the process, while trying to take a photo. The Washington Post reported at the time that the museum instructed for no security to be in the narrow room with visitors, who are allowed 30 seconds inside of viewing. 

A Hirshhorn spokesperson told the Post that the cost of replacing a pumpkin was “negligible,” and the site-specific nature of the installation allows for seemingly endless reconfigurations, all of which are executed in consultation with Kusama.

The 95-year-old Japanese artist is one of the most profitable contemporary artists of today. She grossed $80.9 million at auction last year, beating out David Hockney for the spot of top-selling contemporary artist of 2023 (her most expensive piece sold was the painting A Flower (2014), which fetched nearly $10 million at Christie’s Hong Kong). 

Museums are similarly shelling out to add a Kusama to their collection. In June, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired the “Infinity Room” Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023). The installation, consisting of large transparent acrylic dots suspended like a constellation, will remain on view through January of 2025.

As of this June, SFMOMA reported that its Kusama show, “Infinite Love,” had been seen by 170,000 people.

Infinite Accumulation (2024) is a site-specific work of linked, reflective silver spheres more than 32 feet high, 39 feet wide and more than 328 feet in length. On August 7, the sinewy, shiny artwork was unveiled at Liverpool station by Transport for London, the real estate investment trust company British Land and the City of London Corporation.

“London is a massive metropolis with people of all cultures moving constantly. The spheres symbolize unique personalities while the supporting curvilinear lines allow us to imagine an underpinning social structure,” Kusama said in a press release.

Infinite Accumulation was commissioned in 2017 as part of The Crossrail Art Foundation’s public art program. The highly-polished, reflective mirrored surfaces are also similar to Kusama’s immersive installation Narcissus Garden.

Infinite Accumulation was co-funded by British Land and the City of London Corporation. The Kusama sculpture is the final artwork to be installed and commissioned by the Crossrail Art Programme for the Elizabeth line, the east-west railway in London which opened in May 2022.

Other artworks that were commissioned and installed were Douglas Gordon’s looped video undergroundoverheard at Tottenham Court Road station, Chantal Joffe’s paper collage and aluminum work A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel at Whitechapel station, and the large bronze sculpture Manifold (Major Third) 5:4 by Conrad Shawcross, which was unveiled at Moorgate station in 2023.

The unveiling of Infinite Accumulation occured about a month after London’s Serpentine Galleries showcased its public bronze sculpture by Kusama next to the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Pumpkin is 19.5 feet tall, has a diameter of 18 feet and is painted yellow with black polka dots in the Japanese artist’s signature style.

THE HEADLINES

MUSEUM PEACOCKING. Yesterday, we pointed you in the direction of Egypt building the world’s biggest museum (to store mummies). Today, we bring you China’s own cultural mid-life crisis – the soon-to-be-completed Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s huge and has “topped out” [reached its highest point], marking a major milestone in its construction. It spans more than 600,000 square feet – Egypt’s Giza Museum boasts almost 1 million square feet, by the way – and was designed by Danish architectural studio BIG, in collaboration with Arts Group and Front. Located next to Jinji Lake near the Suzhou Ferris Wheel, the museum is set to be opened to the public in 2025. BIG’s founder Bjarke Ingels said, “Against the open space of the lake, the gentle catenary curvature of the roofs forms a graceful silhouette on the waterfront. Its nodular logic only becomes distinctly discernible when viewed from the [ferris wheel] gondolas above,” he continued. “The stainless roof tiles form a true fifth facade.” The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art will comprise main galleries in four of the pavilion-like spaces. A multifunctional hall, theatre, restaurant and main entrance space will be spread across the other structures.

NO GOURD VIBES. Prominent Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has unveiled a new public sculpture outside the UK’s busiest railway station, Liverpool Street in London. You might be forgiven for assuming it’s a giant pumpkin, but it is in fact an embodiment of another of Kusama’s obsessions – polka dots. Titled Infinite Accumulation, it is her largest ever public sculpture at 330 ft long, 33 ft high, and 40 ft wide. For the monumental site-specific work – which was commissioned by Transport for London (TfL), British Land, and City of London Corporation – Kusama expanded the polka dot into linked forms outside the new Elizabeth line entrance to Liverpool Street. “These dynamic serpentine arches were created intuitively by Kusama, hand-twisting the wires on the original models for the artwork,” TfL said in a statement. “London is a massive metropolis with people of all cultures moving constantly. The spheres symbolize unique personalities while the supporting curvilinear lines allow us to imagine an underpinning social structure,” Kusama said.

THE DIGEST

August 6 would have been Andy Warhol’s 96th birthday. To celebrate it, The Andy Warhol Foundation is launching a unique grants program and selling hundreds of the artist’s works from its collection. The proceeds will benefit dozens of US visual arts organizations. Dubbed the Philanthropy Factory, each grantee will receive money from the sale of at least four works, each valued between $250 and $20,000 each. [The Andy Warhol Foundation]

Venice’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, is in deep water after being accused of corruption, while one of his councillors, Renato Boraso, is under arrest. Italy’s financial police, known as the Guardia di Finanza, have called the investigation into the officials Operation Swamp. Whether or not they get bogged down in their efforts to find anything illegal in Brugnaro buying 100 acres of land near Venice for a knockdown price of 5 million euros remains to be seen. [The Art Newspaper]

A group of Austrian climate protestors who made the headlines for vandalizing a Gustav Klimt painting with black paint has disbanded, saying it has “no prospect of success.” Last Generation Austria threw in the towel after becoming tired of being fined thousands of euros for its activism, which included blocking roads. [The Telegraph]

Two new Banksy murals have been sighted in London over the last couple of days. The first is a black mountain goat perched precariously on the ledge of a wall support, and the other is a pair of black elephants looking lovingly at each other from two windows. What do they mean? Your guess is as good as ours. [The Art Newspaper]

THE KICKER

HEART IN THE RIGHT PLACE. Up-and-coming artists in the seaside town of Worthing in the UK have raised hundreds of pounds for a community defibrillator by painting pizza boxes. A micropub called The Brooksteed organized an auction titled “A Slice of Art” to raise cash for a new potentially life-saving machine, which will be located outside the watering hole. Local artists including Natalie Reilly and Gary Goodman were among those donated artworks. Maurizo Eusibi from “+39 Pizza on the Road,” which serves food at the micropub on Thursdays, donated 30 pizza boxes and artists were invited to decorate them in any way they chose. The auction raised £600 ($760). “A lot of the artists are already successful, so it was nice of them to give us their time. There were also some up and coming artists,” Eusibi said. “There was a lot of competition to buy them and a lot of offers at the auction. We were really quite touched.” [Sussex World]

The bronze work, located next to the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, is titled Pumpkin and stands at 19.5 feet tall and has a diameter of 18 feet. It is painted yellow with black polka dots in the artist’s signature style.

Kusama is known for her immersive installations, intricate paintings, and large-scale sculptures. Since 1946, pumpkins (known as kabocha in the artist’s native Japan) have featured regularly in her practice, and the new artwork is her tallest pumpkin sculpture to date.

“I am sending to London with love my giant pumpkin,” she said. “Since my childhood, pumpkins have been a great comfort to me, they are such tender things to touch, so appealing in color and form. They are humble and amusing at the same time and speak to me of the joy of living.”

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine’s artistic director, said it was an “honor” to present Kusama’s sculpture. “Her signature pumpkins have become a landmark motif for the artist, and this project is a reunion for Kusama and Serpentine.”

Kusama’s first retrospective in the UK was at the Serpentine in 2000. It explored her fascinations with polka dots, nets, food, and sex.

The reflective installation Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023) first premiered at David Zwirner gallery in New York last spring. That show, like many other recent Kusama presentations elsewhere, drew large crowds. SFMOMA said that its recent Kusama show, “Infinite Love,” was seen by 170,000 people.

SFMOMA will put its Instagram-friendly piece on view for visitors on Saturday. It will remain in the mueum’s galleries until January of next year.

The news follows a high-profile apology from the prolific artist to the San Francisco Chronicle last October in response to a criticism from columnist Soleil Ho highlighting the anti-Black statements in her 2003 autobiography Infinity Net.

“I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book,” the Japanese artist said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle supplied by the museum in October. “My message has always been one of love, hope, compassion, and respect for all people. My lifelong intention has been to lift up humanity through my art. I apologize for the pain I have caused.”

In addition to the “Infinity Mirror Room,” SFMOMA also announced it had acquired works by more than five dozen artists, including Amy Sherald, rafa esparza, Oscar Murillo, Martin Wong, Isaac Julien, Rashid Johnson, Christopher Wool, and Virgil Abloh.

“The acquisitions announced today capture an incredible depth of artistic ambition, formal innovation, and social and cultural experience,” museum director Christopher Bedford said in a press statement. “The group reflects SFMOMA’s driving vision to enhance our collection with works by a diverse spectrum of artists who engage with an equally diverse range of subject matter, whether focused on aesthetic experimentation or on grappling with central issues of their time.”

That record follows the sale of Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening sale in New York earlier this month for $46.5 million. That work was the most expensive lot of the New York sales.

“These outstanding results confirm our unwavering dedication to Basquiat’s legacy and truly showed all of which we are capable,” Meiling Lee, Phillips’s head of modern and contemporary art in Asia, said in a press release. 

This spring, Phillips sold three early works by Basquiat. Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, also sold at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art evening sale, bringing in $7.8 million. 

The Hong Kong sale brought in a total of $26.8 million with a sell-through rate of 96 percent, a 10 percent increase from the previous season, the house said. 

Additional highlights from the sale were Banksy’s Leopard and Lamb (2016), which sold for $4.7 million; Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY NETS (ZGHEB) from 2007, which sold for $3.3 million; and another Kusama, Pumpkin (2000), which brought in $1.7 million.

The painting is a rare example of Kusama combining two of her most well-known motifs, dots and the infinity nets. Compositionally the work is split in two, with black dots on a red background on the right side and a black and red net on the left. 

In a statement, Bonhams called the work “immersive and compelling…The endlessly looping and repeating whorls serve as a key motif reused throughout her career, reflecting both her personal history and inner state.”

According to a report released earlier this year, Kusama was the highest selling contemporary artist in 2023. Her work earned $80.9 million at auction that year, more than $30 million that the previous year’s top seller, David Hockney.

The most expensive Kusama sold last year was the 2024 painting A Flower, which brought in almost $10 million during an auction at Christie’s Hong Kong. 

In April 2023 a group of five works by Kusama, all of which were produced within the last 20 years, sold for $22.9 million during a Sotheby’s evening sale, also in Hong Kong.

In recent years Kusama’s popularity in the art market has skyrocketed, with some calling her cultural proliferation, bolstered in 2023 by a retrospective at the M+ Museum and a widely publicized Louis Vuitton campaign, the Kusama Industrial Complex.

Kusama’s most expensive piece sold in 2023 was the painting A Flower (2014), which sold for almost $10 million during an auction at Christie’s Hong Kong. 

“Despite being 95 years old, Japanese trailblazer Yayoi Kusama remains one of the most influential female artists,” Robert Read, head of art and private clients at Hiscox, said in a statement. 

Major auction houses reported a steady market for female contemporary artists, with a 179 percent rise in works sold by that demographic over the past five years. Hiscox also noted that female artists comprised 32 percent of contemporary sales in 2023, up from 29 percent.

More good news, of sorts: The overall value of contemporary art by women only fell by 8 percent in 2023, compared to a 20 percent sales dip from their male counterparts. The total sales of contemporary art at blue-chip auction houses dropped by 17 percent, but the figure still surpasses pre-pandemic numbers by 26 percent.

Buyers, however, seem to be sticking with sure investments. The value of art produced within two years—what the market calls “wet paint” works—fell by 36 percent last year. Additionally, younger artists were outstripped in sales by more established talents, as less than half of all works made by artists under 45 sold above their mid-estimate, compared to 65 percent the prior year. 

“As you can see, art trends move at quite a pace. Flipping continues but is less lucrative and since we last reported, the market has softened considerably,” Read said. He added that “this is particularly challenging for younger artists who’ve seen the price of their work reduce considerably.”

The installation, titled Light of Life (2018), is held by the museum in its permanent collection. Like other, similar works by Kusama, this one has an array of mirrors and lights that throw viewers’ reflections across its space, causing their images to multiply.

Light of Life has been a hit at the museum, with the museum reporting that it helped a 2018 exhibition of light and sound installations bring in more than 100,000 visitors, making it one of the most popular presentations ever staged at the institution.

Per the News & Observer, on April 30, a museum worker “accidentally hit” one of the piece’s mirror panels with a floor scrubber as the work was being cleaned. The museum will now have to create a new panel for the work, a process that is expected to cost $12,000 when manufacturing and shipping costs are counted in.

It wasn’t clear when the work would return to the galleries, but museum officials have reportedly stated that it will not be on view for the remainder of the year.

Kusama recently made headlines for an entirely different reason when a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presentation of her art led some to resurface anti-Black phrases from her 2003 autobiography. The 94-year-old artist apologized, writing, “I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book.”

“I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book,” the Japanese artist said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle supplied by the museum on Friday. “My message has always been one of love, hope, compassion, and respect for all people. My lifelong intention has been to lift up humanity through my art. I apologize for the pain I have caused.”

SF MOMA responds to criticism

The museum’s choice to feature Kusama was criticized by Chronicle columnist Soleil Ho last Thursday. In an email statement to Ho, museum Director Christopher Bedford said that “SFMOMA stands firmly against these and all anti-Black sentiments.”

Bedford also told the Chronicle in a phone interview, “We can use this moment as a catalyst for a broader interrogation of what it means to present artists in our galleries.”

“I think it is a tremendous leadership opportunity for SFMOMA,” Bedford told the Chronicle, citing a series of public programs slated for early next year aimed at addressing the work of artists with “problematic histories.”

“In lots of ways, the statement that Kusama herself made has opened the door for us to become leaders in the field and thinking about the relationship between authorial complexity and artistic expression,” he said.

Bedford said that the programs would be led by SFMOMA’s chief education and community engagement officer, Gamynne Guillotte, and planning for them had been underway since she joined the institution in June.

A long-term issue in multiple publications

It’s worth noting that Kusama used derogatory, offensive language to refer to Black people in several of her written works, not just her autobiography. These anti-Black descriptions received much wider attention after journalist Dexter Thomas wrote about them for Vice in 2017 and Hyperallergic earlier this year. Thomas—who is fluent in Japanese, spent a year abroad at Waseda University as a visiting Fulbright scholar and produced a viral report on what it’s like to be a Black American on Japanese TV for Vice News—also interviewed Kusama the day after the opening of her namesake museum in Tokyo.

In the original 2003 Japanese edition of Infinity Net, Kusama describes Black people using derogatory language in several instances. These include marveling at their “distinctive smell” and “animalistic sex techniques”; a recollection of the artist using a naked black man in her own performance art, with details about his lips and genitals; as well as her lamenting an area of Greenwich Village in New York where she used to live becoming a “slum” with falling real estate prices due to “black people are shooting each other out front.” That last line was deleted from the English translation of Infinity Net.

Kusama’s apology didn’t address the anti-Black comments in her other written works. Thomas noted that Kusama’s 1984 short story The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street also featured “grotesque and voyeuristic depictions” about the smell and genitals of its Black characters, a treatment not applied to the narrative’s white counterparts. In the 1971 play “Tokyo Lee”, which was excerpted in the career survey Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, the Japanese artist also describes its lone Black character as a “WILD-looking, hairy, coal-black savage.”

An intentional choice not made by other Japanese artists

Thomas wanted to make it clear that he didn’t write the articles in Vice and Hyperallergic to prompt Kusama to apologize. He wasn’t hurt or offended by the derogatory and racist language. “It didn’t cause me pain,” he told ARTnews by phone Saturday. “It’s just wack. It’s just boring.”

Thomas emphasized that Kusama’s offensive descriptions of Black people were a frequent theme in her written works specific to her approach, rather than the widespread, infantilizing idea that anti-Black racism is an inherent part of Japanese culture.

He cited Ariyoshi Sawako’s novel Not Because of Color (非色; 1964, untranslated) and photojournalist Yoshida Ruiko’s Hot Days in Harlem (ハーレムの暑い日々; 1972, untranslated) as works by Japanese women artists who lived in New York at the same time as Kusama. Those pieces are far more inclusive, nuanced, sympathetic, and comprehensive at capturing what Black life was like in the city.

“That is not a Japanese cultural value, that black people are animalistic, stupid beings,” said Thomas. “She got that from white people. They gave her that idea. She just wasn’t really creative enough to reject it.”

A wide-ranging, vastly influential career

Aside from novellas and autobiography, Kusama’s artistic works include paintings, installation, sculpture, performance art, film, and poetry. The 94-year-old contemporary artist is best known internationally for her popular, selfie-inducing, mirror-lined “Infinity Rooms”, as well as her use of polka dots.

This year has been particularly busy for the “Kusama Industrial Complex,” as ARTnews contributor Greg Allen called it in 2020. In January, the artist’s second collaboration with Louis Vuitton included a widely-publicized campaign and several stores decorated with references to her work, including polka dots, Narcissus Garden-like chromatic balls, and animatronic robots modeled after her. In March, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery extended its exhibition of Kusama’s work for the second time until July 16. In April, Sotheby’s sold $23 million of her art in a single auction in Hong Kong, and the city’s M+ Museum gave away 10,000 tickets to its blockbuster retrospective. In May, David Zwirner opened a major solo exhibition of her work across its three spaces in New York, immediately drawing long lines. In July, a permanent gallery of Kusama’s work opened at Instituto Inhotim, a sculpture park and museum in Brumadinho, Brazil.

Kusama has lived in the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo since 1977, due to the facility’s supportive art therapy program. She also wrote about her long-term struggles with mental health in Infinity Net. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art,” Kusama wrote.

“Infinite Love,” Kusama’s first solo exhibition in northern California, is scheduled to open at SFMOMA on October 14. According to the Chronicle, the show is already sold out through November.