Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, into an affluent but troubled family, and began experiencing vivid visual and auditory hallucinations as a child, an experience that would define her artistic vision for the rest of her life. She started painting obsessively as a way to cope, translating those hallucinations into repeating dots and nets long before she had a name for what she was doing. In 1958 she moved to New York, where her Infinity Net paintings, dense fields of looping, obsessive brushwork, quickly drew attention in a scene dominated by male painters. Through the 1960s she pushed further into sculpture and performance, covering furniture and household objects in soft, phallic forms and staging nude body-painting happenings that addressed war, sexuality, and gender politics well ahead of her time. Despite friendships with figures like Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, she remained something of an outsider in an art world that often borrowed her ideas without crediti...