Image: Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection, Wrightwood 659, Chicago
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose immersive Infinity Rooms and repeated motifs of polka dots, pumpkins and nets became defining images of contemporary art, has died at 97. Wrightwood 659 in Chicago announced the news in a newsletter on 27 August 2026, saying it was saddened by her passing; it gave no cause of death and no further detail.
The message went out as the exhibition space put advance tickets on sale for Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection, which runs from 25 September to 19 December 2026. The exhibition shows Kusama alongside Mary Bauermeister (1934-2023) and Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), three artists the organisers describe as having worked through expansive proliferations of pattern, repetition and an ordering of chaos.
Born in Germany, Japan and France respectively, Bauermeister, Kusama and Saint Phalle each made their way independently to New York by the early 1960s, where, in the organisers' account, they contributed to the postwar avant-garde by drawing together Abstract Expressionist, Minimalist, Pop, Neo-Dada and Fluxus influences.
The works come from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the national museum of modern and contemporary art, founded by an act of Congress and opened to the public in 1974. The exhibition is curated by Betsy Johnson, assistant curator at the Hirshhorn, and presented by Halsted A&A Foundation at Wrightwood 659.
In its newsletter Wrightwood 659 said the presentation will include Chicago's only Kusama Infinity Rooms, on view exclusively at the venue. Wrightwood 659 occupies a 1920s building reworked by the architect Tadao Ando; the exhibition page states that advance tickets are required and lists a ticket price of $20.
Wrightwood 659 is also presenting Everyday War: Yuan Goang-Ming over the same dates, 25 September to 19 December 2026. That exhibition is an immersive installation adapted from the presentation at the Taiwan Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, curated by Abby Chen, curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and organised by Halsted A&A Foundation at Wrightwood 659 with support in part from the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan.
