New School Montessori elementary students created spotted pumpkins and gourds in the style of artist Yayoi Kusama. Their art teacher, Robin Hartmann, told students about Yayoi’s rise to fame, her unique style and how her mental illness affects the way she expresses herself in her art.
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist working in New York City in a wide variety of art forms: performance art, installations, film, poetry, painting, fashion, fiction and more. Since her childhood, Yayoi has struggled with mental illness and hallucinations which have affected and informed her art. When Yayoi was 10, she painted pumpkins as she saw them in her hallucination, with flashes of light and blanketed in “dense fields of dots.” These polka-dotted visions have become a signature element of Yayoi’s art and help us all to know more about what her brain experiences.
In the photos below you can see New School artists’ drawings as they interpret Yayoi’s style into their own work.
