How a polka-dotted pumpkin became the world’s most coveted art installation

Naoshima, Japan: By the time I reached Buffalo, it was undeniable: The pumpkins were everywhere.

It started on this remote island in western Japan, where for many, Yayoi Kusama’s spotted pumpkins are the main event. A rotund red one greets ferries arriving at the western port of Naoshima, a magnet for culture-sniffing touristsseeking its museums and contemporary art installations. Pumpkin trinkets fill thegift shops. The local buses are covered in Kusama’s signature polka dots, with pictures of the beloved squash plastered on their sides.

On the island’s southern shore, a yellow pumpkin crowns the quiet sea, swarmed by iPhone-wielding visitors at nearly all hours of the day. The pumpkins have become so much a part of Naoshima’s landscape that when I left with only a haphazard photo of the yellow one, snapped while running one morning, it felt borderline sacrilegious.

I was apathetic at first. I’d taken a plane, a car, two trains and a ferry to get there - surely, there were more interesting things to look at than a giant Instagrammable fruit.

But the pumpkins weren’t done with me.

A week later, I was back in South Korea, where I was living at the time, visiting another island destination. At Jeju’s Bonte Museum, apumpkin looms over the line to enter one of Kusama’s infinity rooms, the all-consuming mirrored spaces for which the Japanese artist is best known. Weeks passed - and I had nearly banished the pumpkins from my mind - when I walked into the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne only to find a huge one in the entry hall with outstretched, spiderlike "legs” that made it look as if it was dancing.

Three trips, four massive pumpkins. Huh.

Then, while planning a visit to my hometown, I learned that the Kusama pumpkin that usually lives at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden would also be making the journey to Buffalo, for an exhibit opening at the AKG Art Museum just before I’d arrive.

Were they following me? Or was I following them?

Installation 'Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli’s Field' ahead of the opening of 'Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors', in 2017. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

In truth, it was neither - it’s Kusama’s pumpkin patch; we’re just living in it. The Japanese artist’s creations have been spreading far and wide for years, with no slowdown in sight. Whether you’re visiting the Espace Louis Vuitton in Osaka or the Fondation Beyeler near Basel Switzerland, you can’t go too far in the art world without bumping into one (or 10).

Every artist has their motifs: Monet his water lilies, O’Keeffe her flowers. And art institutions have always had their go-to crowd-pleasers, whether it’s Pollock drip paintings or Calder mobiles. Now pumpkins are sprouting. They function like instant landmarks, putting a remote island, a small museum or even just a gallery space in a larger institution on the map. The Bonte Museum acknowledges as much in its description of its cherished squash, writing that the work "can be found in famous cultural spaces around the world.”

A museum touting that its piece has cousins elsewhere may seem unremarkable in the time of the Labubu, but it runs against the logic that an artwork’s value is tied to its scarcity. As the pumpkins multiply - in sculpturesand social media posts, in cheap knickknacks and luxury handbags - the force drawing people to them somehow only seems to strengthen.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began showing her art publicly in her teens, including her first pumpkin work, a Nihonga-style traditional painting that she exhibited in 1946. She took a hiatus from the theme for decades, during which she developed other visual motifs, such as her signature polka dots and mirror rooms, which would explode in popularity in the 2010s.

Kusama’s work, which uses extensive repetition of dots, strives for what she calls "self-obliteration.” Ironically, that same process has fueled her current omnipresencein art museums as her eye-popping - and impossibly photogenic - designs and patterns have become famous for boosting foot traffic.

Long wooed by what she calls their "generous unpretentiousness,” Kusama has returned to the pumpkin motif repeatedly, making her whimsical, spotted depictions of the squash instantly recognizable. At the 1993 Venice Biennale, where she reintroduced herself to the international art world following a mental health crisis in the 1970s, Kusama fully embraced the pumpkin, showing "Mirror Room (Pumpkin),” a piece that contained countless pumpkins echoing in reflections, and even giving out small pumpkins to visitors.

The yellow pumpkin on Naoshima, installed in 1994, is believed to be her first large-scale, outdoor pumpkin sculpture, paving the way for an abundance of pumpkins to come.

It’s dizzying to try to count them, and it doesn’t help that many have the same name ("Pumpkin”). The yellow one on Naoshima was eventually joined by its red neighbor, completed in 2006. The Bonte Museum’s was harvested in 2013, and the Hirshhorn’s in 2016. Kusama’s tallest bronze pumpkin to date was unveiled at London’s Kensington Gardens last year, standing nearly 20 feet high. Other recent riffs include the five-headed pumpkin statue at SFMOMA, "Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart” (2023), and the rambunctious one I saw at the National Gallery of Victoria, "Dancing Pumpkin” (2020).

But that’s just scratching the pumpkin skin. The Dallas Museum of Art is currently showing her squash-filled mirror room "All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” (2016). Pumpkin count there? Endless.

The 96-year-old artist, who has resided in a psychiatric institute since 1977, works daily with a team of assistants in her studio across the road, according to Phillips auction house. She first saw pumpkins while visiting a plant nursery with her grandfather during elementary school and has called them "a great comfort to me since my childhood.”

In spaces that often contain head-scratching conceptual works and artspeak-laden wall text, many visitors find that same sense of ease in her representations of them.

"So much contemporary art requires some prior knowledge or art historic knowledge,” said Mary Ittelson, a business professor and founder of the Art Business Lab at the University of Chicago, "but the pumpkins are really easy to grasp.”

As museums grapple with an increasingly difficult funding landscape, attracting a wide audience is crucial. Kusama, whose work has a wow factor and scans as mostly apolitical, has become a natural go-to.

"There’s lots of economic pressure,” Ittelson said. "If you can show an artist that has this kind of universal appeal for all ages without a controversy and still has real artistic chops and real depth, it’s kind of a win-win.”

Ittelson said the hope with acquiring these pumpkin sculptures is to re-create a variant of what’s known as the "Bilbao effect,” which refers to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and describes a phenomenon in which cultural investment brings about economic growth. In such cases, the artwork or piece of architecture itself becomes the destination.

In some places, Kusama already has. This summer’s exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Victoria was the most ticketed show in the institution’s history. A similar story played out at the Hirshhorn in 2017, when a blockbuster Kusama exhibition helped break museum attendance records and the institution saw its membership increase by 6,566 percent.

The pumpkins are a significant investment. Kusama has been ranked the top-selling artist in the world two years in a row, and of the top 25 most expensive artworks made after 2000 and sold last year, three were pumpkin sculptures, including one that sold for $5.6 million at Christie’s. (Three Kusama works featuring pumpkins also appeared on the list the year prior.)

Looking at all the pumpkins, it’s easy to worry that museums are becoming increasingly homogenous, like chain restaurants with the same item on the menu. But Kusama’s success follows decades of setbacks for her, including mental health struggles that pulled her off the art-world stage, and years relegated to the shadows of her male contemporaries in New York. For Gloria Sutton, a contemporary art historian focusing on art, technology and feminism at Northeastern University, the latter challenge makes her present dominance all the more exciting.

"I have no problem with the ubiquity of the work because when she first produced it, it was consciously shut down,” Sutton said. "… The idea of taking up as much real estate space, visual attention, and translating that to a language that can be globally transmitted is extraordinary.”

In a way, her commercial prowess is the ultimate marker of success for an artist who rivaled Warhol in his time and is deeply engaged with pop art. "This is one of the few artists that you will see that is both populous, popular and also in the collections of the 1 percent,” Sutton said.

Despite its bubbly exterior, Kusama’s art also carries deeper questions and darker concerns. To Sutton, the pumpkins cannot be separated from her wider polka-dot practice - which is rooted in childhood hallucinations and has been used in political advocacy.

"It’s important to realize that the dot in the pumpkin you see now connects back to that dot that was also hand-painted on naked bodies that were protesting Vietnam,” Sutton said.

While her work has wide appeal now, it was born on the fringes, said Midori Yamamura,author of "Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular” and an expert on Kusama.

"She’s not creating those artworks being very happy, but more coming from the marginalized world and looking at the mainstream,” Yamamura said, noting how unwieldy and weighty pumpkins can be. It functions as a kind of self-portrait, she said, "really representing the artist’s incapability of conforming to social standards.”
In that awkwardness, there is something endearing, even relatable.

When Kusama’s pumpkin was placed on Naoshima, islanders soon began creating their own versions and placing them on their gates, Yamamura recalled. "These are people who never really saw contemporary artworks, and they grew to like it so much that it became their identity,” she said. "It’s a theme which is very approachable for people from all walks of life,” Yamamura said.

"Approachable” might be an understatement for how Michael Mararian, a Buffalo-based artist, felt looking at the pumpkin at the AKG Museum this month.

Describing the piece as "larger than life,” he said it brought him back to being a kid and reading "Jack and the Beanstalk.” The urge it sparked in him was equally childlike.

"You really want to just touch them, rub your hands on them,” he said. "Even hug them.”