Yayoi Kusama

Kusama grew up in Matsumoto and studied nihonga painting in Kyoto for a year before American abstract impressionism pulled her elsewhere. She moved to New York in 1958 and spent the 1960s in the avant-garde trenches, staging happenings where naked participants became canvases for her signature dots - a stunt that caught the counterculture wave and influenced Warhol and Oldenburg. The 1970s went quiet; her work fell out of view. A revival in the 1980s brought her back, and she hasn't stopped since. She's lived in a mental health facility since the '70s and speaks plainly about it: art is the thread she follows to stay alive, the only method she's found that eases the pain.