Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Infinity Mirrors’ Will Tour US, Guaranteeing a Blockbuster

Get ready for an avalanche of selfies.

Yayoi Kusama at her show "I Who Have Arrived In Heaven," at David Zwirner Gallery in 2013. Photo Andrew Toth/Getty Images.

Get ready for a nationwide blockbuster: Beloved Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama will be the subject of an exhibition that will travel from coast to coast, opening at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, DC, before touching down at museums from Ontario to Los Angeles.

The exhibition, surveying seven decades of the 87-year-old artist’s output, will feature no fewer than a half-dozen of her massively popular installation works, reports the Los Angeles Times. The so-called “infinity rooms,” consisting of mirrored rooms with strings of LED lights hanging from the ceilings, have drawn crowds around the world, with art lovers lining up for hours for a brief visit.

The year 2014 “belonged to” Kusama in terms of global exhibition attendance, according to the Art Newspaper’s museum attendance report, which had her retrospective “Infinite Obsession” bringing in more than two million visitors in South and Central America. The polka dot- and mirror-obsessed artist’s engrossing installations dominate social media wherever they travel, with people wildly posting and liking photos of the easy-to-love immersive works.

Yayoi Kusama, <em>Infinity Mirrored Room</em>. Courtesy of the Broad, Los Angeles.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room. Courtesy of the Broad, Los Angeles.

The upcoming US exhibition will almost certainly continue the artist’s string of hit shows, and will likely be a fixture on must-see lists for 2017.

“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” will appear at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, opening February 23, 2017. It will then appear at the Seattle Art Museum, June to September 2017; the Broad Museum from October 2017 to January 2018; and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Cleveland Museum of Art, with dates to be determined.


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