The Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama, which will open on Thursday, October 2, and will remain on view through March 2, 2026. A preview for AKG members starts Friday, September 26. The exhibition celebrates the visionary artist Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, born 1929) and showcases fundamental artworks, including two of her transcendent Infinity Mirrored Rooms and one of her monumental pumpkins (Pumpkin, 2016). The Infinity Mirrored Rooms represent her first, Phalli’s Field, 1965/2017, and one of her most recent, My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe, 2018, which was jointly acquired by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2022.

Both Infinity Mirror Rooms create dazzling sensations of infinite space, filled with objects adorned with her signature dot motif. They transform the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a perceptual and participatory experience. Upon entering the artist’s breakthrough, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field, 1965/2017, visitors will find themselves reflected infinitely in all directions, creating a playful and sometimes disorienting, but memorable experience. Inside Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe their sense of location is lost, as they find themselves navigating a prescribed path through a field of colorful dotted paper lanterns which gradually change color.

AKG members receive an array of benefits throughout the run of One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama including advance access (September 26–29), exclusive access to online reservations, and invitations to special events and programming. Additionally, the special exhibition admission fee will be waived for members at the Associate level and above.

Kusama was active in avant-garde circles during the formative years of pop art and minimalism and, as such, her work is closely related to the work of other beloved artists in the AKG collection. Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, for example, have cited Kusama as influential to the development of assemblage, environmental art, and performative practices. In recent years, Kusama has achieved tremendous critical respect as well as celebrity status, making her a playful introduction to contemporary and immersive art for many new visitors.

About the Artist

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano, in 1929. Today, she continues to produce paintings in Tokyo. She studied traditional Nihonga (Japanese-style) painting in Kyoto and moved to New York City in 1958. There, she was active in avant-garde circles, exhibiting her work alongside such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Allan Kaprow.

Kusama exhibited widely in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in the mid-1960s, participating in exhibitions with artists associated with Nul, ZERO, and the New Tendency in Europe, where she began developing her interest in the optics and interactive elements of mirrors, electric lights, sound, and kinetics. The artist’s fame grew in the late 1960s through her radical antiwar happenings, which espoused nudity and polka dots in the streets of New York. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, where she has since resided. 

***

One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden where it was curated by Assistant Curator Betsy Johnson. It is organized for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum by Associate Curator Andrea Alvarez.

***

About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In June 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG opened anew to the public. The project was funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

***

About the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the Hirshhorn is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Museum presents diverse exhibitions including Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors in 2017 and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all—364 days a year. The Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden will reopen in 2026 following a three-year revitalization. For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu.

###