Yayoi Kusama

Accumulation No. 1 is the first in an ongoing series of presciently feminist sculptures by Kusama. When the twenty-nine-year-old artist arrived in New York from Japan in 1958, she had already developed what she called an “infinity net” motif: a signature pattern of interlocking cellular forms that she painted on room-size canvases with the stated goal of covering “the entire world.” This ambitious fantasy spurred her to expand the infinity net and its variants—repeated dots and phallic protuberances—into three dimensions. In 1962 she began a group of sculptures composed of household furniture that she covered with stuffed and hand-sewn canvas phalluses and then painted. Though their sexual explicitness is hard to ignore, critics at the time prudishly avoided any mention of this aspect of the works.

Kusama made Accumulation No. 1 in her Manhattan loft, which was located in the same downtown building as the studio of her friend the artist Claes Oldenburg. An early example of soft sculpture, it resonates closely with Oldenburg’s stuffed canvas sculptures of supersized domestic objects made around the same time. It was shown at the Green Gallery in New York in late 1962, along with works by Oldenburg and others, in what was widely considered the first group exhibition to focus on Pop art.