The Last Dots, Yayoi Kusama's Final Decade Comes to Chelsea

Yayoi Kusama died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14. She was 97. A statement on her official website announced the death, and NPR reported that her gallery gave the cause as multiple organ failure. Less than three weeks later, on September 2, that gallery made its own announcement. David Zwirner will stage an exhibition of work from the final decade of her life in one of its Chelsea spaces next April.

So far the plan is a month and a neighborhood. What the gallery has said is enough. Zwirner told The New York Times that those last ten years were arguably "the most extraordinary and successful decade of her career," as ARTnews reported on the day of the announcement. For a city that spent the past decade waiting in hour-long lines on West 19th Street to see her rooms, that is a promise and a farewell in the same breath.

The Line on West Nineteenth

Kusama and Zwirner go back to 2013. That year the gallery began representing her, and its first show with her, I Who Have Arrived in Heaven, filled all three of its spaces on West 19th Street. She was in New York for the opening. In a statement after her death, Zwirner said that visit was her last to the city, and that the show she opened then was the first of many at his galleries where people stood in line for an hour to get in.

The shows kept coming. Give Me Love followed in 2015. In 2017, Festival of Life ran alongside a separate presentation of her Infinity Nets paintings. Every Day I Pray for Love arrived in 2019. In 2023 came I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, which Time Out called her largest gallery exhibition to date. It stretched across 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street, with a room of black and yellow pumpkins reaching toward the ceiling, oversized dotted flowers, 36 paintings from her Every Day I Pray for Love series, and a mirrored infinity room that visitors entered by crouching through a small yellow door.

For a city that spent the past decade waiting in hour-long lines on West 19th Street to see her rooms, that is a promise and a farewell in the same breath.

The lines became part of how New York knew her. Zwirner's statement put her standing plainly. At the time of her death, he said, Kusama was "without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world."

A New York Story First

Before the pumpkins and the handbags, Kusama was a New York artist. According to the ARTnews obituary, she left Japan for the United States in 1957, spent time in Seattle, and then settled in Manhattan. Her Infinity Nets paintings drew notice at the Brata Gallery in 1959. By the mid-1960s, her gallery's biography says, she had made her name here as an important avant-garde artist, partly through her happenings. She went back to Japan in 1973, after roughly 16 years in the United States, and lived there for the rest of her life. New York stayed in the story anyway.

The city's museums kept her close. The Museum of Modern Art co-organized a major survey of her work with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998. A large retrospective in 2011 and 2012 moved through Madrid, Paris, and London before reaching the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2021 her work filled the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

And one piece is here for good. In 2023, a mosaic commission titled A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe was unveiled in the Madison Concourse at Grand Central. The gallery says it will remain on permanent view. It is there for anyone cutting through the concourse on the way home, bright and patterned and entirely hers.

The Last Decade

The years the Zwirner show will cover were quiet in public and busy everywhere else. ARTnews notes that Kusama made her last public appearance in 2017, at the Tokyo museum that bears her name. Her studio, run by a small and close team of assistants, kept turning out paintings and sculptures. A large pumpkin sculpture went up at the Yayoi Kusama Museum in 2024.

The market kept pace too. In 2023, ARTnews reports, she was the best-selling artist at auction, with $80.9 million in sales, and at her death she was the most expensive contemporary female artist. That same year a Louis Vuitton collaboration put her dots on bags and surfboards, and the brand's New York store installed an animatronic version of the artist.

At the time of her death, he said, Kusama was "without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world."

Elsewhere, her work is still on the road. A traveling European retrospective that opened at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel in 2025 and moved on to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is now at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where the gallery says it runs until January 17, 2027.

New York gets its own chance in the spring. The announcement, as ARTnews reported it, came without a title or a list of works, and with no word on whether another mirrored room will be part of it. What there is, for now, is a Chelsea gallery and a season to wait.

If the past decade is any guide, the line will form. For a decade it was a way to spend an afternoon. Next April it will be a way to say goodbye.

For more on how the city's museums are programming the season, see our look at Taryn Simon's takeover of the Guggenheim rotunda.