She Changed the World From an Asylum in Tokyo

Ms. Munroe is a writer and senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum and organized Yayoi Kusama’s first retrospective exhibition.

In 1988, when I met her, Yayoi Kusama had been living in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo for over a decade, and was nearly forgotten by the art world in New York. As a graduate student researching postwar Japanese art, I had been invited to curate the opening exhibition at a new institution in New York, the Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA). I chose Ms. Kusama, with the ambition to wrest her from obscurity.

When she died last month, 37 years later, Ms. Kusama — in her life........

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