In 1963, when Kusama took nearly 100 airmail labels and affixed them to a sheet of paper in a precisely repeating pattern, Pop art was gaining traction. “I was in the vanguard of Pop Art, and regarded as a Pop artist by the people around me,” she has claimed. Her use of mass-produced, utilitarian consumer items to create Airmail No. 2 Accumulation aligned with the Pop artists’ interest in directly engaging with the world around them by incorporating the stuff of everyday life into their art. This approach violated one of the central tenets of the Abstract Expressionists, who sought to purify painting of all references to the world outside of the canvas. Kusama’s stacked airmail stamps, in their vivid American flag colors of red, white, and blue, coalesce into a vibrating pattern that also reflects her interest in the perceptual illusions of Op art.
In The Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting online course, Coursera, 2017
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Yayoi Kusama
Japanese, born 1929 112 works onlineA vital part of New York’s avant-garde art scene from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Yayoi Kusama developed a distinctive style utilizing approaches associated with Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, Feminist art, and Institutional Critique—but she always defined herself in her own terms.
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Pop art
A movement comprising initially British, then American artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Pop artists borrowed imagery from popular culture—from sources including television, comic books, and print advertising—often to challenge conventional values propagated by the mass media, from notions of femininity and domesticity to consumerism and patriotism.
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