Fans can now once again experience Kusama’s wild and wonderful work in person at an installation aptly titled "You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies." Permanently housed at the Phoenix Art Museum, this piece features a 25-foot square space with mirror-lined walls, a polished black granite floor, a black plexiglass ceiling, and 250 dangling LED lights programmed to change colors. The effect is ethereal and expansive. Like much of Kusama’s work, it overwhelms and nearly obliterates your sense of self, space, and time through its visual force. The exhibit is located in the Contemporary Art Wing of the Phoenix Art Museum, just off North Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix.
The 89-year-old Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama is finally being recognized as one of the greatest living artists in the world.
Having moved to New York just in time for the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, Kusama became known for her wild “happenings.” She staged large events featuring nude people covered in polka dots, opened a nude painting studio and social club, and even wrote a letter to Richard Nixon offering to have vigorous sex with him if he stopped the Vietnam War.
Despite being a darling of New York’s counterculture art scene, Kusama was largely forgotten after she returned to Japan in 1973 due to health issues, where she voluntarily resided in a hospital for the mentally ill.
Kusama never stopped making art, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that her work began to gain international recognition again. Since then, her reputation has steadily grown. Working from the hospital, she sold a piece of artwork in 2008 for $5.1 million, setting a record for the highest price paid to a living female artist.
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