Search, post and discuss

[Anna]

Search, post and discuss
1. Yayoi Kusama.
Search the Internet to find answers to these questions:
1. Where was Yayoi Kusama born and what was her family background?
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, into an affluent family of merchants who owned a plant nursery and seed farm.
2. What are the main media she works in?
She started to paint using polka dots and nets, pastels and oils, primarily on paper. She has also worked in sculpture, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations, film production and newspaper publication, novels, open-air sculptures, open-air pieces …
3. What art movements has she been involved in?
Styles in which she has been involved are Feminist art, surrealism, Contemporary art, Minimalist art and pop art, basically.
4. She is sometimes associated with Art Brut. What is this?
Art Brut is referred to art created out of official culture limits; it is especially aimed to artistic manifestations done by mental hospital patients.
5. What record does she hold?
The record she holds is for her piece of art "Infinity Net" painting No. 2, sold for US$5.1 million at Christie’s, a record for a living female artist.

Kusama became the most expensive living female artist at auction when White No. 28 (1960) from her signature “Infinity Nets” series was sold for $7.1 million at a 2014 Christie's auction.

She also has been ranked the most popular artist of the year after receiving over 8,500 visitors each day in her Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession, in 2014, in some Latin venues.
6. What are some of her other installations like?
The chosen places for Kusama‘s “performances” or “stagings” must be wide open (or rather outdoors) , spacious and lighted, free of walls or cubicles, because she always searches people to get involved on her art, provoke public’s complicity, as people have to interact. The installations shown on these places are big, flat plane surfaces in order to interact with. Bright colours are used, mainly white. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. The concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. Coloured dots and huge pumpkins are constantly represented on her art, a pattern which identifies her.

True or false?
1. A representative fruit of her art is the pumpkin, which represents for her a kind of alter-ego or self-portrait.

2. In 1977, she checked herself in a mental hospital where she lived for a few years.

3. The artist has been recognised by media for making her exhibitions accessible to visitors with disabilities or mobility people.

4. Although Kusama has been recognised as an iconic artist, she has never received any award.

5. Yoko Ono has cited Kusama as an influence.

6. She first started producing her painting when she was in her twenties, after having a serious mental crisis, due to a hallucinogen phase.

7. She went to the United States in 1957, where she met a lot of artists and was enormously productive, but it wasn’t until the late 1980s and 1990s, she went back to Japan, that success knocked at her door.

8. When living in New York, she had a passionate, but platonic, relationship with the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell.

9. “If it hadn’t been for polka dots, I’d had commit suicide”, she said…

10. Her works in cinema and fashion have been unnoticed.

[Admin]

These are great Anna! Who can answer??? :)