This immersive installation featuring pumpkins is the only Infinity Mirror Room of its kind in a North American collection, now on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through Jan. 18.
As summer temperatures inch up, cicadas whine endlessly and ice cream melts a little too quickly, North Texans can escape into Yayoi Kusama’s All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, an Infinity Mirror Room that drops visitors into the most extraordinary pumpkin patch. The iconic pumpkin mirror room installation is on view through Jan. 18 at the Dallas Museum of Art.
The Dallas Museum of Art acquired All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016) in 2017, and it made its debut at the museum in 2018. This installation returns as the centerpiece of Return to Infinity: Yayoi Kusama. The exhibition includes a timeline of Kusama’s seven-decade-long career and her affinity for the pumpkin.
A timed reservation is required for Yayoi Kusama: Return to Infinity.
“This presentation, Return to Infinity, celebrates Kusama’s deep connection to the pumpkin,” said Dr. Vivian Li, the museum’s Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art and curator of this exhibition. “Growing up in rural Japan, surrounded by nature, she started drawing pumpkins.”
It was a simple beginning to what developed into an extraordinary career. While Kusama began incorporating the Japanese pumpkin, or kabocha squash, into her art in the late 1940s, she did not debut her first Infinity Mirror Room until 1965 in New York. Phalli’s Field, the 25 square-metre mirrored room featuring stuffed phallic-shaped tubers, is a seminal work for an artist interested in experimenting with repetition and perception.
When Kusama returned to Japan in the late 1970s, she revisited the pumpkin motif and in the 1980s, she incorporated pumpkins into her dot patterned works. When Kusama was the first solo artist to represent Japan at the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993, she chose her first pumpkin-themed mirror room, Mirror Room (Pumpkin), to anchor the show.
All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins expands on Kusama’s original pumpkin room. Polka-dotted pumpkins of various sizes seemingly fill an endless cosmic expanse. As visitors step into the room, they enter the sublime, becoming part of the art.
“You are transported into a growing field of pumpkins. They are reflected back again and again and multiplied, even upside down so be sure up,” Li said.
While the room is only 13 square feet, it feels limitless.
“What Kusama creates inside is a vast, magnificent universe,” Li said.
Visitors need to reserve timed tickets for this installation. Only two people are allowed to enter the room at a time and a museum attendant ushers visitors in and out of the installation. Visitors are only in the room for a little over a minute and photos and videos – without flash, tripods and selfie sticks — are encouraged.
“There’s no right or wrong way to experience a pumpkin room. It might feel joyful or fun. It might feel surreal or deeply introspective. But in your precious 45 seconds, I encourage you to look not just with your camera, but with your eyes,” Li said.
Kimberly Richard
Kimberly Richard
Pictures are encouraged, but so is enjoying the experience through the naked eye.
Surrounded by endless pumpkins, visitors can create an intimate bond with an artist who sees herself in a common autumnal fruit, no matter what the season is outside of the museum.
“Now 96 years old, Kusama is undeniably a global icon and yet, she still connects deeply with the humble pumpkin as a form self-portraiture, seeing it as joyful, unpretentious, and full of life,” Li said.
Learn more: Dallas Museum of Art