Yayoi Kusama, Whose Polka Dots Made Latin America Queue for Hours, Dies at 97

Art & Obituary

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots and infinity rooms made her the most queue-generating exhibitor in contemporary art, died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital at 97 — her studio announced the death on Thursday, and Latin America holds some of her most visited works.

Her official website announced Thursday what the Tokyo hospital had recorded two weeks earlier: Yayoi Kusama died on August 14, 2026, at 97. She kept painting, her team said, until days before her death.

A Death Announced Two Weeks Later

Kusama’s studio said she died on August 14 in Tokyo and that she ‘never stopped painting until shortly before her death, continuing her pursuit of eternal love and the soul throughout her 97 years.’ The announcement came Thursday, August 27.

The delayed announcement is consistent with how her studio has managed every aspect of her later life — tightly, and on its own schedule.

The Mexico City Furore

Latin America’s defining Kusama moment came at Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo, where ‘Obsesión Infinita’ — her first Latin American retrospective, spanning 1950 to 2014 — ran from late 2015 into January 2016 and drew crowds that wrapped around the block in Chapultepec.

The show’s Infinity Rooms turned the exhibition into a social-media event years before ‘immersive art’ became an industry, and it remains the reference point for every blockbuster show Mexico has hosted since.

Where Latin America Keeps Her

Brazil’s Inhotim, the open-air museum in Minas Gerais, opened a permanent Galeria Yayoi Kusama in July 2023 with two immersive works: ‘Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity’ (2009), a lantern-lit mirror room, and ‘I’m Here, But Nothing’ (2000), a domestic interior under black light.

At the park’s entrance, ‘Narcissus Garden’ floats 750 stainless-steel spheres on the Burle Marx center’s reflecting pool — a version of the work she famously sold, uninvited, outside the 1966 Venice Biennale with a sign reading ‘Your narcissism for sale’.

The Obsession Behind the Dots

Kusama traced her patterns to childhood hallucinations — fields of dots that she said threatened to obliterate her, and that she answered by making them her vocabulary for more than 70 years.

That concept of ‘self-obliteration’ — dissolving the self into infinite pattern — is what her rooms stage for visitors, and what made her the most photographed artist of the Instagram era.

What Happens to the Work Now

Her studio gave no details on pending exhibitions; Dutch media noted she died weeks before a scheduled Amsterdam show. Institutions holding her work, from Inhotim to the Tamayo, are expected to see renewed visitation.

For expats in Brazil, Inhotim’s Kusama gallery — one of only a handful of permanent rooms she ever authorized — now becomes a site of pilgrimage in a more literal sense.

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