One of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s popular “Infinity Mirror Room” installations—equally acclaimed as thoughtful cosmic experiences and denounced as shallow and overcrowded selfie wormholes—is coming to the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA has acquired the 2016 work, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, with help from collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. The installation, jointly owned by the DMA and the Rachofskys, will join the museum’s collection this fall, and will be on display from Oct. 1 through Feb. 25, according to a press release.
“All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins provides opportunities to explore a range of contemporary art movements within our collection, as well as the undeniable influence of Kusama across decades,” Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s director, says in the release. “We are excited to share this boundary pushing, experiential work with our visitors and to be the only museum in North America to have one of Kusama’s pumpkin-themed mirror rooms represented in our collection.”
Visitors will be able to step into the installation to take in a room that prominently features two of Kusama’s biggest obsessions: pumpkins and mirrors simulating the stretch of infinity. “This major installation highlights one of Kusama’s most intense moments of innovation, in a pioneering six decades of artistic production that has traversed Conceptual art, Pop, Surrealism and Minimalism,” says Gavin Delahunty, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art, in the press release. “The Infinity Mirror Rooms are key to understanding her practice, and as such we are delighted to welcome it to Dallas, joining several other major works by the artist in our community.”
This is Kusama’s first pumpkin-sprinkled room since 1991, and while the 88-year-old has been a known name and innovative artist for decades, the spread of the camera-equipped smartphone has made her work ubiquitous. Recent Kusama exhibitions in Houston and Washington, D.C. have drawn thousands of contemplative art lovers and needy selfie-takers. As with the DMA’s blockbuster Mexico 1900-1950 show, expect record crowds. Love it or hate it, the kind of participatory art exemplified by Kusama’s Mirror Rooms (and Dallas’ own Aurora) has an audience. The trick is in fitting that audience into the room.
