Popular Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose “Infinity Mirror Rooms” generated one blockbuster exhibition after another, has apologized for racist comments in her 2002 autobiography, which appeared at the opening of her new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of New Modern art once again caused a stir in York.
“I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book,” Kusama, 94, said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle last week. “My message has always been one of love, hope, compassion and respect for all people. My lifelong goal has been to empower humanity through my art. I apologize for the pain I have caused.”
Kusama’s apology, which came the day before the opening of her exhibit “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love” at the museum, referenced passages from her 2002 autobiography “Infinity Net,” in which she described black people as “primitive, hypersexualized” creatures .”
The website Hyperallergic published these comments in June. Last week, a Chronicle critic condemned the museum’s decision to continue the exhibition.
In the original Japanese edition of the book, Kusama also called her New York neighborhood a “slum” where real estate prices “fell by $5 a day” because “blacks were shooting each other outside the door and homeless people were sleeping there.” These sentences were removed from a later English translation.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began painting as a result of hallucinations she experienced as a young girl. She has spoken openly about her struggles with psychiatric illness but continues to paint.
The controversy surrounding Kusama’s comments is the latest example of an institution being forced to confront the problematic personal history of a prominent artistic figure. And the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has been forced to reckon with what staffers call structural inequalities related to race.
Its longest-serving curator, Gary Garrels, resigned in 2020 shortly after he was quoted in a post as saying, “Don’t worry, we will definitely continue to collect white artists.” And its former director, Neal Benezra, apologized Employees after he removed critical comments from an Instagram post following the killing of George Floyd.
In a telephone interview Tuesday, the museum’s current director, Christopher Bedford, said he welcomed the opportunity to “talk very openly about the museum’s relationship with anti-racism” and “to think about how we can present difficult topics in a nuanced way.”
Bedford said the museum has already planned a symposium next spring “on the question of autobiography in relation to creativity and how we as a culture reconcile the two when they may be at odds with each other.” A longer-term goal is to develop interpretive material for the public “about these difficult relationships between maker and objects,” he said.
Regarding Kusama, Bedford said: “I find it truly extraordinary that a woman in her tenth decade of life, who has created a stunning body of work and has been marginalized and discriminated against in various ways, would apologize in an unqualified way for racist comments.
“Our mission is to collect, exhibit and interpret artists in all their complexity,” he added. “Like everyone else, they are flawed. And the profound effort is not to delete, edit, or cancel people; The effort is to reckon with them fully and truthfully.”