Baby Carriage

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known for her use of organic motifs and obsessively repeated patterns, and her highly individual works bear strong affinities with both Pop and minimalism. Born to a prosperous family in Matsumoto City, Kusama studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts for a year. She was intrigued by America and corresponded with painter Georgia O'Keeffe before relocating to New York City in 1958. In 1962 (the year Claes Oldenburg also began to make soft sculptures), Kusama began appropriating everyday objects and covering them with handmade forms; she often used phallic forms, and such works became parts of her "Sex-Obsession" and "Compulsion Furniture" series. Kusama said that as a woman, a phallus was something she feared. By manipulating and controlling them, she was able to keep this fear at bay.

This work, a baby carriage covered in soft phalluses, was created in 1964 predominantly in a red material covered in white polka dots, with a smaller number of the protrusions covered in a black- and- white striped material. It was exhibited at the Richard Castellane Gallery in New York in November 1965, next to another Kusama piece, a female mannequin covered in rotelle pasta painted white (Macaroni Girl), with blue and purple slipperlike objects nearby on the floor. Of polka dots, the artist proclaimed in 1968, "The polka dot has the form of the sun, signifying masculine energy, the source of life. The polka dot has the form of the moon, symbolizing the feminine principle of reproduction and growth. Polka dots suggest multiplication to infinity." In 1966, shortly after the show closed, Kusama reworked Baby Carriage, painting it in metallic silver and adding the three kangaroos; the artist later recalled that she did this as it had become dirty while on display. Today, the red and white material shows through in certain areas.

Joseph Cornell was her great friend, mentor, and would-be lover ("I disliked sex, and he was impotent; we suited each other very well," Kusama later recalled), and after his 1972 death she chose to leave New York, moving back to Japan.

The AMAM collection also includes a White Net Painting from 1960. She described such works as "curtains which separated me from people and reality."