3. Yayoi Kusama’s Involvement in Art Movements

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3 Yayoi Kusama’s involvement in Art Movements

Yayoi Kusama was one of the forerunners of various art movements; for instance, pop art, minimalism and feminism. (Nayeri, 2012) She was influential enough to have had contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal exhibit her works alongside them. Yayoi Kusama was the most involved in art movements during 1957, when she first moved to the United States and settled in New York. It started when she painted a series of pieces that were influenced by the abstract expressionist art movement. In the 1960s, she was involved in the pop art movement, and thus became a fixture of the New York avant-garde. Kusama then fully immersed herself in the hippie counterculture in the late 1960s, where she had painted nude participants with bright polka dots and had them appear in public in New York (Fig 1e), with the message, as quoted “Please stop war and live out the brilliance of life.” (Pilling, 2012)

Fig 1e: Anti-war Happening at Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1968, reprinted 2017