Iconic Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, internationally known for her exquisite net and dot paintings as well as sculpture and performance work, collaborates with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for a limited series, feauturing skateboards painted with her signature polka dots.
A limited edition of 500 boards are now available in Black Small Dots, Black Big Dots, Red Small Dots and Red Big Dots. The boards come in two colour combinations: red dots on a white deck, or black dots on a yellow background. Both options are available with large or small spots. These Canadian maple wood skateboards feature details from DOTS OBSESSION (2018), by Yayoi Kusama.
Kusama meticulously hand-painted her famous motif over each deck.
The 500 Dots Skateboards are replicas of artworks specially created by Yayoi Kusama.
The original skateboards began as samples based on digital renderings of details from Kusama’s work. They were sent to Kusama’s studio in Tokyo for her approval. After reviewing them, Kusama decided they needed to be altered. She then meticulously hand-painted her famous motif over each deck.
© 2018 Yayoi Kusama
Find more info about the MoMa limited collection here!
About Yayoi Kusama
Born in 1929 to a prosperous family in central Japan, Kusama was doing pencil drawings that featured her distinctive motif of dots and net-like patterns by the time she was 10. During World War II, she and her classmates worked in a local parachute factory to support the war effort and after the war she entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts, graduating in 1949, although she was judged “not passing” in drawing.
Despite strong efforts from her family to discourage her becoming an artist, Kusama began to exhibit in group exhibitions. Ongoing family disapproval, however, resulted in what Kusama calls her “era of mental breakdown.” This acknowledgment of her condition and the ongoing struggle against it, became the enabling force behind Kusama’s art. She moved to New York in 1957 and in 1959 had her first solo exhibition of five net paintings, vast canvases covered with tiny repeating patterns, at Brata Gallery, a well-regarded Tenth Street cooperative space. The show was an immediate success and Kusama’s work received acclaim from artist Donald Judd and writer and critic Dore Ashton.
During the ’60s, despite successful group shows, solo exhibitions, and wild public performances, Kusama experienced recurrent bouts of depression. In February 1975 she entered the Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo, a private psychiatric hospital known for using art therapy to treat neuroses, where she continues to live today. Kusama maintains a studio outside the hospital grounds and makes art with the help of assistants. In addition to her recent installations, Kusama has written several fictional novels and composed 13 pieces of music.
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