The Broad announces its first visiting special exhibit: ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors’

Since the Broad opened last September, Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room” — with its reflective walls, pools of water and glimmering, outer-space-like crystal LEDs — has been the museum’s social media star, a popular art-selfie backdrop for visitors, particularly millennials posting on Facebook and Instagram.

Now the Broad is announcing that the installation (full title: “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away”) will be followed with the museum’s first visiting special exhibition: “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” a seven-decade survey of the 87-year-old Japanese artist’s work, including six of her immersive “Infinity Mirror” rooms.

The exhibit is the first survey of Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror” rooms and was organized by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where it will debut Feb. 23, 2017. The exhibit then moves to the Seattle Art Museum from June to September 2017, the Broad from October 2017 to January 2018, followed by stints at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Broad’s current “Infinity Mirror” room, which pop star Adele used as a video backdrop, has been nothing short of “a cultural phenomenon,” museum founding director Joanne Heyler said in the announcement for the upcoming exhibit.

“The timing seems right to offer an exhibition that contextualizes the Infinity Mirror rooms and brings Yayoi Kusama’s contributions to 20^th and 21^st century art into deeper focus,” she said. “We are thrilled to present this unprecedented special exhibition at the Broad next year that engages seven decades of work by this phenomenal artist.”

Regular admission to the Broad is free but the Kusama show will be paid; the museum hasn’t yet announced the fee. The exhibition will include the artist’s 1965/2016 work “Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field,” featuring red phallic objects reflected in mirrored walls, and the domed and polka dot-filled “Dots Obsession — Love Transformed Into Dots,” from 2007. The exhibition also will include paintings, works on paper and sculptures from the early ’50s to the present. Some works have not yet been exhibited in North America.

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