Yayoi Kusama, the Artist Who Put Polka Dots Everywhere From Infinity Rooms to Louis Vuitton, Dies at 97

Yayoi Kusama, whose repeating dots and mirrored rooms made her one of the most recognizable artists alive, has died at 97. She died on Aug. 14 of multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo, ARTnews reports. Her death was reported on Thursday (Aug. 27) by Kyodo News and later confirmed by her longtime gallery, David Zwirner.

A statement from her company and studio said: “She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.”

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“At the time of her passing, Kusama was, without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world,” David Zwirner said. “I will miss her terribly.”

From Matsumoto to New York

Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, and said she saw “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots” from childhood. She drew to cope with those hallucinations. In 1957, she left Japan for the United States, after writing to Georgia O’Keeffe for advice, and by 1959 her “Infinity Nets” paintings were drawing attention at New York’s Brata Gallery.

In 1965, she debuted Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, the first of the mirrored environments that would become her best-known work. In 1966, she staged Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale without an invitation, laying 1,500 reflective spheres on a lawn outside the exhibition grounds until officials stepped in. Twenty-seven years later, in 1993, she returned as Japan’s official representative.

The Dots Went Everywhere

Kusama’s later decades were a boom. ARTnews notes that her 2017 touring show Infinity Mirrors, which opened at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., put lines around the block, and PA Media says her infinity rooms were a hit at Tate Modern in London from 2021 to 2024. In 2023, a revived Louis Vuitton collaboration (the first was in 2012) covered the fashion house’s stores in New York, Paris and Tokyo in polka dots and animatronic figures of the artist, and became a social-media phenomenon.

The market followed, and it is still running hot: see this summer’s record auction half-years. ARTnews reports she was the top-selling contemporary artist of 2023, with $80.9 million at auction. Japan honored her with the Praemium Imperiale in 2006, a Person of Cultural Merit citation in 2009 and the Order of Culture in 2016. She opened her own museum in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in 2017, and her yellow Pumpkin on the island of Naoshima is one of the country’s best-known public artworks.

Why It Matters

Few artists have shaped how pop culture looks as much as Kusama. Her dots show up on museum walls, fashion storefronts and social feeds, and she kept painting and writing novels and poetry while showing in major museums. Her story is also a reminder that the Venice Biennale, which is in the middle of its own summer of controversy, once shut down her unauthorized work on its lawn.

In her memoir Polka Dot Autobiography, she wrote what she hoped would come after her: “I hope that the polka dots will continue to proliferate and carry my message to people everywhere.”

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.