Midori Yamamura

Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) was active among major United States artists in New York City in the sixties, a key moment of transculturalization in American art history. However, the social orientation at the time led to a critical oversight of gender and ethnicity that excluded this Japanese woman from mainstream art history. Moreover, her voluntary residence in a mental health facility since 1977 positions Kusama as an outsider artist. This dissertation will examine her work and influence between 1945, the year the United States government began dictating policy in Japan, and 1969, the last year Kusama actively worked in New York City. I will focus on the issues entailed in her work and on U.S. cultural politics as they bear on her situation and her practice.

Kusama came of age in the period following World War II, arrived in the United States in 1957, and was active in the New York art scene between 1959 and 1969. She showed with the pop and minimalist artists during their formative years. Beginning in 1960, she also exhibited with the Zero group in Europe. But the level of recognition enjoyed by Kusama’s white male peers has long eluded her in this country. Some scholars have suggested that Kusama had considerable influence on the work of Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg, among others, but no one has yet demonstrated it.

After her permanent return to Japan in 1973, Kusama was virtually forgotten in the United States until her retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York in 1989. Kusama’s residence in a mental health facility since 1977—which she attributes to “depersonalization” driven by trauma—has been conceived of by some scholars as “insanity” and has distracted them from discerning her full historical contribution. The issue of women’s mental health, at once problematic and significant, is one I will examine.

The key to an alternative view of Kusama’s career as well as those of her peers lies in the rich personal and public archival materials from this period and in Kusama’s 2002 autobiography. By examining artworks by Kusama and her peers and grounding my study on archival research and oral history, I hope to draw a more comprehensive picture of emergent postwar cultural diversity and internationalism. I hope to show that what constitutes cultural value is not the artwork alone, but the cultural politics engaged in by the artists themselves as well as collectors, dealers, critics, and governments.