Eliana Willis

After a year spent largely inside, New Yorkers have a joyful gift awaiting them at the New York Botanical Garden. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored orbs, bold polka dots, and signature pumpkins are being unveiled after a year’s delay amid the seasonal rebirth that is early spring, surrounded by blossoming daffodils and cherry trees.
“People are just itching to be outdoors and to see something cultural again,” Nicholas Lechi, the garden’s senior director of communications, told Artnet News.
The exhibition, “Kusama: Cosmic Infinity,” functions as a celebratory reminder that despite the struggles of the past year—and rightly maligned editorials to the contrary—this city is still here, and still has so much to offer. After the long, dark winter, it’s not only the art show we need, but the art show we deserve.
Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden (1966/2021) at the New York Botanical Garden. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Unlike her wildly popular museum exhibitions, where visitors queue for hours for the chance to spend 30 seconds inside one of Kusama’s mirrored “infinity rooms,” most of the art here can be experienced outdoors without long lines, making it ideal for the age of social distancing.
“It’s a refreshing experience since we don’t normally see art that way. You go from one gallery to the next,” curator Mika Yoshitake said at the exhibition’s press preview. “Kusama’s work really enhances the botanical landscape.”
Yayoi Kusama, Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees (2002/2021) at the New York Botanical Garden. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
The setting is a fitting one for the artist, who grew up in a seed nursery, and for whom flowers are a recurring motif.
“There’s a very visceral connection to nature that you see in her forms,” Yoshitake said.
Yayoi Kusama around age 10. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The garden was forced to pare back on its indoor exhibition plans because of the pandemic, so only the first floor library space is in use, showcasing a limited selection of paintings and sculptures.
But there’s plenty to see outdoors. Greeting visitors at the entrance fountain is the smiling sun sculpture I Want to Fly to the Universe (2020), while the fabric-wrapped trees of Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees (2002/2021) line the path in front of the library.
Yayoi Kusama in Flower Obsession. Photo by Yuzuke Miyazake ©Yayoi Kusama 2021.
Outside the conservatory stands the monumental Dancing Pumpkin (2020), a bronze sculpture that combines the artist’s love of tentacles and pumpkins. And one of artist’s most famous works, the shiny steel orbs of Narcissus Garden (1966/2021), is installed in the Native Plant Garden, floating in the shallow waters like a sea of tiny globes.
Those four Kusama artworks are on view to all visitors, but the indoor works, including those in the conservatory and library, will require a special galleries ticket, priced at $35 for adults. (General grounds admission is $25.)
Later in the season, health regulations permitting, the show will add one final piece, Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart (2020), which features colored glass and natural light. Guests will be required to purchase a separate ticket for access.
Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkins Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity (2017). Collection of the artist.Photo courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner.
Weekend dates are already sold out through June 30, but the show is on view through Halloween, providing ample opportunity to visit despite capacity restrictions.
And for those who looking for an extra helping of Kusama—or who can’t snag a ticket to the gardens yet—New York gallery David Benrimon Fine Art is opening a show of the artist’s prints next week.
But the garden, with the interplay of the sun and breeze and flowers, undoubtedly offers a unique way to experience Kusama’s work.
“This exhibition will be great to see as the seasons change,” Leshi said. “So now you’re seeing spring, then you’ll see summer, then you’ll see the fall and there’ll be different things like the Kiku, the Japanese chrysanthemums.”
See more photos from the show below.
Yayoi Kusama, Dancing Pumpkin (2020) at the New York Botanical Garden. Collection of the artist. Photo by Robert Benson Photography, courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner.
Yayoi Kusama, My Soul Blooms Forever (2019) at the New York Botanical Garden. Collection of the artist. Photo by Robert Benson Photography, courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner.
Yayoi Kusama, Starry Pumpkin at the New York Botanical Garden. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden (1966/2021) at the New York Botanical Garden. Collection of the artist. Photo by Robert Benson Photography, courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner.
Yayoi Kusama, Life (2015) at the New York Botanical Garden. Collection of the artist. Photo by Robert Benson Photography, courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner.
Flower paintings by Yayoi Kusama at the New York Botanical Garden. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Kusama: Cosmic Nature” is on view at the New York Botanical Garden, Southern Boulevard, Bronx, April 10–October 31, 2021.
“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity” is on view at David Benrimon Fine Art, the Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, April 15–May 27, 2021. 
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You are probably not doing much aimless browsing in stores right now. But if you did find yourself walking through the airy fifth floor of Nordstrom’s 57th Street flagship in Manhattan, you would encounter an artist’s tender ode to suburban teenage girlhood tucked in between rows of cosmetic displays and candy-colored athleisure.
The installation, by filmmaker and multimedia artist Maggie Lee, is the latest site-specific work in an ongoing partnership between the retailer and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s emerging artist program, which began in 2018.
Malls have a special place in the artist’s heart; she recalls spending endless afternoons as a child waiting for her mother to finish work at a department store in suburban New Jersey.
“I thought about department stores and malls and how teenagers like to spend time in places for long periods of time and for no good reason at all,” the artist said in a statement. Of course, today, teens are more likely to spend time with one another in virtual space than real life. But Lee’s work is a remnant of a less connected time, and extends an open invitation for anyone to loiter.
The installation, called Daytime Sparkles, is a more sanitized and arch version of other nostalgia trips, like Hulu’s cringe-comedy series Pen15, which celebrate the awkwardness and joy of coming of age. What Lee wants is for others “to reclaim and be part of something. To see something special in the daytime—a sparkle is irregular.”
The living room-style space is configured around clunky television sets, which screen commercials Lee created to advertise products that teenage girls could only dream of affording: luxe Diptyque candles with scents like Mimosa, Fig Tree, and Tuberose and $65 Byredo Suede hand wash (perhaps the 2021 equivalent of Bath & Body Works cucumber-watermelon body spray).
On the walls, glittery floral cutouts and origami folding stars are arranged in clusters, alongside a few large “NO LOITERING” signs. A pop song the artist produced in collaboration with Stefan Tcherepnin is plays over the speakers.
Installation view, Maggie Lee, “Daytime Sparkles.” Photo: Connie Zhou. Courtesy of Nordstrom.
The seeds for this project were planted when Lee’s mother died unexpectedly in 2012 and she found herself thrust back into her childhood home in suburban New Jersey. At the time, Lee was constantly blogging to work through her grief, and her posts caught the attention of producer Asher Penn, who invited her to turn her musings into a film. The result, a feature-length film called Mommy, was released in 2015 by Beta Pictures, and also figured in group shows at Greene Naftali and the Whitney.
Combining snippets of home videos, voicemails, family photographs, stuffed animals, and internet screen savers, Mommy is a sort of memorial time capsule. Daytime Sparkles continues this thread—but what is trapped in amber now is Lee’s younger self and a past-time at the mall that may soon go extinct.
Daytime Sparkles is on view through May 16, 2021 at Nordstrom NYC Flagship, 5th Floor
Installation view of Maggie Lee’s Mommy (2015) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Installation view, Maggie Lee, “Daytime Sparkles.” Photo: Connie Zhou. Courtesy of Nordstrom.
Installation view, Maggie Lee, “Daytime Sparkles.” Photo: Connie Zhou. Courtesy of Nordstrom.
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What is a table? According to the characters in a humorous artist book by Lawrence Weiner, it’s “something to put something on.” Simple enough, right? Not for artist Rashid Johnson, who has said that reading Weiner’s book, aptly titled Something to Put Something On, sparked a whole new way of thinking, and inspired his series of shelf-like sculptures that would hold a range of objects with specific importance to Johnson.
“I was really interested in this idea,” Johnson says in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of its New York Close Up series, “the semiotics of how something exists and why it exists and what we call it. So I started making something to put something on.” 
Johnson made the shelves from black wax, pieces of mirrors, tiles, and branded wood, all chosen to send up traditional notions of domestic objects are constructed with. Lining the shelves are pieces of the artist’s Afro-centric material life: “the books I was reading, the records I was listening to, the things I was applying to my body,” he tells Art21, and the combination of those things became stand-ins for the artist, his cultural affiliations, and “began to gel together to form what I thought was my conversation.”
Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Rashid Johnson Makes Things to Put Things On.” © Art21, Inc. 2011.
Influences including James Van Der Zee’s photographs of the Harlem Renaissance, Sun Ra’s mystical Afro-futurist philosophy, and Marcus Garvey’s political views all meld together in Johnson’s fictional secret society: The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club—an acknowledgement of the historic struggles of Black Americans tempered by an optimism for the future.
“It’s not fully about the predicament of history,” Johnson says in the video, which first aired in 2011, “it’s about what you’re able to author yourself and how you’re able to form the future rather than living purely kind of in the past.”
For one of his latest shows, at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, Johnson has installed his sculpture The Crisis, a steel yellow pyramid that is activated by an accompanying ballet, conceived with choreographer Claudia Schreier. The performance follows two hikers, both African American, on individual journeys that eventually meet up.
“How does the Black body function in space when it’s being witnessed versus when it’s not?” the artist asks, noting the rise of footage of violence against Black men and women, and the onslaught of media at the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s about how the body becomes accustomed to the conditions of stress and anxiety.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Rashid Johnson: The Crisis” is on view at Storm King Art Center through November 8, 2021. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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