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Yayoi Kusama

Students painted and sculpted clay to wrap around two lamp posts embracing the energy, color and patterning of Yayoi Kusama's work in addition they painted a picnic table with her signature dots.

    Yumi Audy, Bertha Cabrera, Jeng Yu Chang, Megan Gardner, Dan He, Hina Jamal, Mishal Jamal, Justin James, Sorraya Jehle, Wen Jiang, Monika Mehta, Shalini Mehta, Nadia Nasiri, Nhien Nguyen, Daisy Odell, Kyra Sycip, Tanya Tafolla, Li Ling Wei, Eugene Yoon,

Inspiration: Yayoi Kusama

Nationality: Japanese

Born: March 22, 1929; Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan

Movement: Feminist Art, Outsider art (Art brut), Pop Art

Class work: At the beginning of the project, students studied the work of Yayoi Kusama as well as articles, documentaries, and exhibitions. Students embraced the energy, color and obsessive patterning of the artist’s work. We were all fascinated with Kusama’s childhood hallucinations and the way she managed her mental health by voluntarily living in a psychiatric asylum in Tokyo.

Yumi Audy

  • I threw 16 tentacles on the wheel at once. It's possible to easily change the shape of thrown pieces when they've become leather hard. I twisted them, bent them and attached them onto the slab. I also made two Kusama figures because the display I saw in 2016 at Louis Vuitton which was a collaboration with Kusama had her figure within the tentacles. Drawing all the lines and circles is a therapeutic thing for Kusama, but it was totally the opposite for me. The glazing part was so hard that it drove me crazy.

Soraya Jehle

  • Yayoi Kusama is an avant-garde artist. She is well known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her intense, large-scale environments. I was very excited to build my cylinders with the idea of incorporating the dots as pumpkins and cones along with them. I wanted to give my cylinders as much dimension as it was possible. Seeing my art on the pole, made me feel very proud of my work. This task was one of my favorite projects. I wouldn't have done anything different but perhaps made another one.

Tanya Tafolla

  • We learned about factors which influenced Yayoi Kusama's out of the box style such as her turbulent childhood in Japan and going against the grain as a female modern artist in New York. The pressure may have been too much for the young artist to bear, as she ended up moving back to Tokyo in the 90's to check into a psychiatric institute where she continued creating art work. In order to fully understand Kusama's work we studied articles, documentaries, and her exhibitions. We were encouraged to push the boundaries of what clay can do by experimenting with color, surface, and form in order to embrace Kusama's colorful and obsessive patterning.

Learn more about the artist that inspired this project.

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