On Yayoi Kusama: A Life of Mark-Making

Kusama (1929-2026) created obsessive marks throughout her work that rendered the hallucinatory experience as a new, constructed environment. Mark-making as a practice has been integral to my studio research, alongside an understanding of pop art as demonstrating the obvious and the factual, similar to Kusama's studies, in crazed, repetitive, and unconventional ways. 

I was pleased to see one of her final Infinity Mirror installations at the Royal Ontario Museum in late 2025. It had just opened. I didn't expect to see her meandering through the streets of Toronto in the beginnings of that bitter cold, but the exhibition had reawakened my belief in art again as if she were giving me a gentle touch of understanding herself. Life had stiff-armed me to a point where it felt like god had taken that from me, too. 

Thank you, Ms. Kusama. You were a deeply controversial human being - capable of the best and worst of that experience, which you had no shame in. You meant something to me anyways. Rest well.

Yayoi Kusama

March 22, 1929 - August 26, 2026