Yayoi Kusama is everywhere (USA 2007)

***Peter Blum SOHO Gallery, New York, NY I have been making prints ever since I was captivated by their allure, and am constantly overwhelmed by the brilliance arising from within the process of making them. - Yayoi Kusama

Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Yayoi Kusama Prints from 1982 to 2004, at Peter Blum SoHo, 99 Wooster Street, New York. This is the first survey of Kusama's prints in the United States. On view will be a selection of over 20 years of her print works, including etchings, lithographs, and silkscreens. Kusama's prints reflect ideas and themes found throughout her entire body of work. Her prints, like her work in other mediums, reveal her unique vision of the world. Kusama has said that from a young age she suffered from hallucinations, seeing auras and dots and hearing voices from plants and animals. Rather than battle with these visual and audible illusions, she painted and drew them. As a result, her characteristic imagery of infinity nets, monochrome colors, repetitive and abstract forms developed, and was often incorporated in her prints, installation, sculpture, painting, collage and performance. Furthermore, the repetitive process of printmaking and the idea of multiples appeal to her aesthetic. Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto-shi, Nagano-ken, Japan. She currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including a significant solo exhibition in 1989 at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and a major retrospective that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 1998-1999. In addition, Kusama was the representative artist for Japan in the 1993 Venice Biennial.
EXHIBITION AT PETER BLUM SOHOMay 24 - July 27, 2007EXTENDED (Following Summer Break) Open August 21-25YAYOI KUSAMA: Prints from 1982 to 2004 http://www.peterblumgallery.com/soho.html

***Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA: Contemporary Outlook: Japan ( July 2, 20 07 - February 10, 2008 ) Printable

In her series “The Artist Papers,” Kunie Sugiura makes life-sized photograms depicting characteristic gestures, performances, and actions by a variety of famous artists, including Takashi Murakami.
Since Japan dropped its longstanding policy of national isolation in the 1850s, there has been an immensely creative give-and-take between the cultures of Japan and the West. After World War II, especially, many Japanese artists began working in art forms derived from the international scene, moving away from local traditions. At the same time, traditional subject matter and styles endured. While some artists explored new and different motifs and styles using traditional media, others embraced Western materials, subject matters, and styles. This installation is by no means a complete review of recent art from Japan; instead it focuses on a few selected works created by artists of three recent generations. The first came of age directly after World War II; some are just coming to the world’s attention now. Strains of western styles and approaches like abstract expressionism, pop, “happenings,” minimalism, and feminist art can be seen here, but the results are also uniquely Japanese in concerns and approach. The works are the product of a particularly fertile period of artistic experimentation, one that generated a unique synthesis of ideas and forms from East and West. Artists in the exhibition include Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Daido Moriyama, Mariko Mori, and Chinatsu Ban.Contemporary Outlook is an exciting new series of small focused exhibitions, drawn mainly from the MFA collections, that examines emerging trends, issues, ideas, and ways of looking at art and artists.

***Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY: Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era on view May 24, 2007 - September 16, 2007

Summer 2007 revisits the unprecedented explosion of contemporary art and popular culture brought about by the civil unrest and pervasive social change of the 1960s and early '70s, when a new psychedelic aesthetic emerged in art, music, film, architecture, graphic design, and fashion. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by Isaac Abrams, Richard Avedon, Lynda Benglis, Richard Hamilton, Elliott Landy, Jimi Hendrix (his only known watercolor), Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Lindner, and John McCracken, among others, as well as a rich selection of important posters, album covers and underground magazines. A special emphasis is placed on environments as well as on film, video and multimedia installations, including works by Jordan Belson, USCO, Stan VanDerBeek, James Whitney, and Lamonte Young and Marian Zazeela. The exhibition includes films of performances and light shows, and spotlights places such as the UFO nightclub in London and the Human Be-In in San Francisco, featuring Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. Organized by Tate Liverpool and originally presented there, the show has toured to the Kunsthalle Schirn Frankfurt and the Kunsthalle Wien.