Yayoi Kusama, the Polka-Dot Artist Who Chose to Live in a Psychiatric Hospital for Nearly 50 Years, Has Died at 97

27 Aug 2026, 05:32 by Nicole Stawiarski · Thought Catalog

Alain Nogues / Sygma via Getty Images

Updated 7 hours ago, August 27, 2026

She turned her lifelong hallucinations into polka dots and infinity rooms that people waited hours to stand inside for 30 seconds. The art world ignored her for decades, then made her one of the most famous artists alive.

Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14 at 97, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc. said in a statement Thursday. She kept painting until her final days.

Yoko Ono leans in to speak with Yayoi Kusama at Sydney’s Customs House ahead of the 12th Biennale of Sydney in May 2000, where both Japanese artists had work on display. Photo by Greg Wood / AFP via Getty Images.

She started seeing hallucinations as a child in Matsumoto, Japan, where flowers seemed to swarm and speak to her. Drawing what she saw became a coping mechanism, and those visions of endless repeating patterns became the engine of her whole career.

She left Japan for New York in 1958, rejecting an arranged marriage her family had planned. In 1962 she sold one of her early “infinity net” paintings to fellow artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd for $75. In 2014, her painting White No. 28 sold for $7.1 million, a record at the time for a living female artist.

Surrounded by cascading colored lights reflected endlessly in mirrored walls, Kusama sits cross-legged inside one of her Infinity Room installations during a 2001 Paris exhibition. Photo by Alain Nogues / Sygma via Getty Images.

She always said white male artists, Andy Warhol among them, appropriated her ideas while she was written out of art history. She staged “body festivals” with naked performers painted in polka dots, presented uninvited work at the 1966 Venice Biennale, and once wrote to Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War.

Kusama paints intricate body art on Martha Melnyk of Philadelphia during a Body Festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in September 1967. Photo by Bettmann / Getty Images.

After a mental health collapse, she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital in 1977 and chose to live there permanently, working every day in a nearby studio from morning to night. The recognition that eluded her early on arrived late: retrospectives at MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Hirshhorn, and a 2024 show in Australia that became the most attended exhibition in that country’s history.

“I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death,” she once said. “It feels good to be an outsider.”

Wearing her signature red bob wig and a polka-dotted red outfit, Kusama faces journalists at a Tokyo press conference on October 17, 2006, after winning the Praemium Imperiale’s painting prize. Photo by Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP via Getty Images.

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