New School Montessori preprimary students have been learning about the work and style of Yayoi Kusama and her iconic polka dots in the Obliteration Room. As you can read from this student’s language work spread out on her cloth mat, she wanted to process what she’d heard about this fascinating artist writing, “The Obliteration Room has lots of dots. The Obliteration Room is a room filled with dots. Yayoi Kusama is an artist. She is from Japan.”
Below, you can learn more about the artist and see what the Obliteration Room looked like before visitors were invited to place colored sticker dots on the white walls, the white furniture, the white toys and the white floors. Click to see a video showing the transformation process.
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who has worked in poetry, fiction, painting, drawing, sculpture, fashion, film and more. She moved to New York City in 1958 and has been involved in many movements including conceptual art, feminism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. Yayoi embraced the counterculture of the 1960s and is famous for her use of polka dots in her work.
Photo of Yayoi Kusama is from Wikipedia and screenshots below are from YouTube’s Bloomberg TateShots.
