Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at The Broad

Due to overwhelming demand, The Broad has announced additional tickets and extended hours for the upcoming special exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. These newly announced tickets will go on sale Monday, October 2 at noon PT, and are expected to sell out quickly.

During the September 1 ticket release, the initial offering of 50,000 tickets sold out in less than two hours. The Broad has decided to stay open an additional 14 hours each week, for a total of 62 operational hours per week. In addition to these extended hours, the museum is also increasing the number of visitors it will accommodate during operating hours.  This increase in both hours and visitors per hour will allow for nearly 40,000 additional advance tickets to be made available in the upcoming release.

Interested ticket buyers should visit thebroad.org anytime between 11 a.m. and noon PT on October 2 and will be placed in an online waiting room. All users in the waiting room by noon will have an equal opportunity for access to tickets. At noon exactly, all users in the online waiting room will receive one of two messages: they will either receive a randomized number that will allow them to book tickets, or they will be informed that they were not randomly selected. Due to extremely high demand, not every user who joins the online waiting room will be able to purchase tickets. All users who receive a number will be able to purchase tickets.

In addition to this second ticket release, a limited number of same-day standby tickets will be available each day throughout the run of the exhibition, for both regular hours and extended hours. Standby tickets will be available on-site on a first-come, first-served basis.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors opens at The Broad on October 21, 2017 and runs through January 1, 2018.

The traveling exhibition is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

EXTENDED HOURS (Exhibition only):     Tuesday/Wednesday: 5-7 p.m.

                                                                     Thursday/Friday: 10-11 a.m., 8-9 p.m.

                                                                     Saturday: 9-10 a.m., 8-10 p.m.

                                                                     Sunday: 9-10 a.m., 6-8 p.m.

TICKET PRICE:                                            $25 advance, $30 on-site.

                                                                      Children 12 and under FREE.

About Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors 

The exhibition—opening at The Broad on Oct. 21 and on view through Jan. 1, 2018—is the first institutional survey to explore the celebrated Japanese artist’s immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms, and The Broad will be the only museum in California to host the exhibition as it continues its six venue North American tour.

A limited number of same-day standby tickets will be available each day during the run of the exhibition.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will provide visitors with the unique opportunity to experience six of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms—the artist’s most iconic kaleidoscopic environments—alongside large-scale installations and key paintings, sculptures and works on paper.

Since opening in September 2015, The Broad has featured Kusama’s installation Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013, from the Broad collection. One of the most popular artworks on view at The Broad, the work will be accessible to free general admission ticketholders until September 30, 2017, when it will transition to be included in the special exhibition through January 1, 2018. Following the special exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the artwork will once again be accessible with a free, timed, same-day reservation.

Ticket Release Schedule 

On September 1, 2017 at noon PT, The Broad will release timed tickets for the entire run of the exhibition. Special exhibition tickets include same-day general admission for The Broad’s third-floor galleries. Advanced tickets will be $25 for adults, free for children 12 and under, and will be available at thebroad.org. On-site standby tickets will be $30 for adults, free for children 12 and under.

About the Exhibition 

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Curated by Mika Yoshitake, curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the exhibition includes the artist’s milestone installation Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (Floor Show), 1965/2016, a dense and dizzying field of hundreds of red-spotted phallic tubers in a room lined with mirrors.

The exhibition will also include Infinity Mirrored Room—Love Forever, 1966/1994, a hexagonal chamber into which viewers will be able to peer from the outside, seeing colored flashing lights that reflect endlessly from ceiling to floor. The work is a re-creation of Kusama’s legendary 1966 mirror room Kusama’s Peep Show or Endless Love Show (no longer extant); the mirror panels were used to stage group performances in her studio in the late 1960s.

Kusama’s signature bold polka dots will be featured in Dots Obsession—Love Transformed into Dots, 2007, a domed mirror room surrounded by inflatables suspended from the ceiling. More recent spectacular LED environments, filled with lanterns or crystalline balls that seem to extend into infinite space, will be represented by Infinity Mirrored Room—Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009, and The Broad’s Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.

A selection of more than 60 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and archival materials will also be on view, showcasing several of Kusama’s lesser-known collages, made after her return to Japan in 1973. These works trace the artist’s trajectory from her early surrealist works on paper, Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation assemblages to recent paintings and soft sculptures, highlighting recurring themes of nature and fantasy, utopia and dystopia, unity and isolation, obsession and detachment, and life and death.

The exhibition will conclude with Kusama’s iconic participatory installation The Obliteration Room, 2002-present, an all-white replica of a traditional domestic setting. Upon entering, visitors will be invited to cover every surface of the furnished gallery with multicolored polka dot stickers, gradually engulfing the entire space in pulsating color.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog that takes an unprecedented interdisciplinary approach to her work and includes a catalogue raisonné of Kusama’s infinity rooms, along with an illustrated chronology and artist biography with newly published archival material. The contributing authors introduce new research that sheds light on this pioneering contemporary artist, including essays by Yoshitake, Gloria Sutton and Alexander Dumbadze and an interview with Kusama conducted by Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn.

About the Artist

Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano, in 1929, and works at her studio in Tokyo. She studied traditional Nihonga (Japanese-style) painting in Kyoto and moved to New York City in 1958. There, she was active in avant-garde circles during the formative years of Pop art and Minimalism, exhibiting her work alongside such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow—figures who have cited Kusama as influential to the development of assemblage, environmental art and performative practices.

Kusama exhibited widely in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands in the mid-1960s, participating in exhibitions with artists associated with Nul, Zero and the New Tendency in Europe, where she began developing her interest in the optics and interactive elements of mirrors, electric lights, sound and kinetics.

Kusama’s fame grew in the late 1960s through her radical antiwar happenings, which espoused nudity and polka dots in the streets of New York. Because of ongoing struggles with her health, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, where she has since resided. In recent years, Kusama has achieved celebrity status as well as tremendous critical respect.

For more information on #InfiniteKusama and The Broad’s presentation of Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, visit thebroad.org/art/special-exhibitions/yayoi-kusama-infinity-mirrors.

About The Broad

The Broad is a contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the museum offers free general admission. The Broad is home to the 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide, and has launched an active program of rotating temporary exhibitions and innovative audience engagement. The 120,000-square-foot building features two floors of gallery space and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library, which has actively loaned collection works to museums around the world since 1984. Since opening in September 2015, The Broad has welcomed more than 1.2 million visitors.

Hours of Operation

The Broad is open to the public six days a week at the following times: Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Broad is closed to the public on Mondays, as well as on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

For more information on The Broad and to sign up for updates, please visit thebroad.org.

About the Hirshhorn, the exhibition organizing institution

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the Hirshhorn is located prominently on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. With nearly 12,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, mixed-media installations, works on paper and new media works, its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Hirshhorn presents diverse exhibitions and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all, 364 days a year. For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu.