The Speed Art Museum presents “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room – Let’s Survive Forever.” This immersive experience, originally created in 2017, is the first time any of Kusama’s “Infinity Room” works have been presented in Kentucky.
On special loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario, “Let’s Survive Forever” welcomes visitors inside a large mirrored space with stainless steel spheres suspended from the ceiling and arranged on the floor. The reflective spheres recall Kusama’s installation “Narcissus Garden,” which was first on view at the 1966 Venice Biennale. While that piece can be interpreted as a protest of the commercialization of art, “Let’s Survive Forever” explores ideas of introspection and self-obliteration through repetition of form and the interplay of light, color, time, and space.
Born in Tokyo in in 1929, Yayoi Kusama works in sculpture and installation as well as painting, performance, video art, fashion, and other forms. Although her work is conceptual, it is distinctly informed by surrealism and feminism. Much of her work is considered pop art and she was influential to both Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Her room-size installations are distinctly pop in their visual schema and their interactivity, as the immersive experiences blur the boundary between art and viewer.
Kusama is recognized globally as one of the most significant living artists from Japan, and is quantifiably the most critically successful living artist and the most commercially successful living woman artist. She turned 95 in 2024, reaffirming her place as “a true icon of contemporary culture through not only her artworks and performances but also her collaborations with fashion houses, design brands, and so much more,” says Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum.
“Over the decades, Kusama became a unique, transgressive trailblazer for women as a female artist in a male-dominated art world. Now, here in Kentucky for the first time, we can all enter her imagination simply by walking into her mirrored artwork.”
The Speed Art Museum’s Learning, Engagement and Belonging Team — in collaboration with Louisville-based Rockerbuilt Studio — created an “Infinity Lab” to accompany “Let’s Survive Forever.” In the similarly immersive “Infinity Lab,” visitors will be able to engage with reflective materials, which encourage exploration of the ideas of infinity and illusion, and contribute to a community-created installation.
“It’s very open-ended,” says Karen Gillenwater, Director of the Learning, Engagement and Belonging Team. “Guests can create a sculpture out of foil then select a spot in the lab to display it, or they can help cover furniture and other objects in the lounge with reflective materials, then hang out and enjoy the space.”
“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room — Let’s Survive Forever” opens on July 12 and will be on view until January 12, 2025.
This article appears in Jul 3-16, 2024.