Art Talk: The World of Yayoi Kusama

* Thursday, March 14, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm

Yayoi Kusama has been called the most important living Japanese artist, the world’s best-selling female artist, and the world’s most successful living artist—and the princess of polka dots.

For seven decades, Kusama has explored infinity in a variety of media: paintings, mixed media artwork, mirror rooms, and sculptures, including her celebrated polka dot-covered pumpkins. For Kusama, “a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living lifework.”

Take a trip around the world with Kusama, stopping at her installations on the Japanese art island Naoshima, the Kusama museum in Tokyo, Grand Central Station in New York, and ending with her first infinity room in Northern California, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, at SFMOMA through September 2024.

Presenter Avril Angevine is an arts lecturer with a particular interest in modern, contemporary, and California art. She speaks on many subjects at various locations in the Bay Area, including the OLLI programs at Santa Clara University, Dominican College, San Francisco State, and the Fromm Institute.

Avril has a BA in English and an MA in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and taught English and Humanities at local colleges. She is also a museum guide at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, and a docent at the Oakland Museum of California.