Before Yayoi Kusama Made ‘Infinity Rooms,’ She Created Standout Political Works

Has there ever been a more unlikely artist sensation than Yayoi Kusama? Today, she’s known best for her “Infinity Rooms”—large-scale enclosed environments that have become Instagram fodder, with their endless reflections of reflections, polka-dotted surfaces, and glittering lights luring in droves of people in search of selfies, transcendence, and more.
But the recent Kusama craze has obscured what landed her in art history in first place—namely, her boundary-pushin