On the second floor of Wrightwood 659, sits a portal to another world. Or, rather, two portals.
The boutique art museum in Lincoln Park is currently displaying two Infinity Mirror Rooms, the colorful, reflective and immersive artworks from the wildly popular Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who died in August at the age of 97.
The show at Wrightwood, “Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection,” opens Friday and runs through Dec. 19. It is currently the only place in Chicago to experience Kusama’s mirrored rooms. Local audiences may be familiar with Kusama’s work from Chicago’s WNDR Museum, which, before it closed for good this month, featured the infinity room titled “LOVE IS CALLING.”
While Kusama developed the Infinity Mirror Rooms for decades — in fact, the show at Wrightwood features her first from 1965 — they had a resurgence in widespread popularity beginning in 2017, when the exhibit, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” toured the country. The show drew record attendance levels at several museums and generated tremendous internet buzz, with visitors posting their mirrored art selfies to Instagram.
The moment helped to solidify Kusama’s place not only in art history, but also in pop culture. It led to her personal appearance — a blunt red bob and colorful dresses with geometric patterns — becoming as instantly recognizable as the polka dots and pumpkins often featured in her work.
But those bright colored motifs were pulled from Kusama’s own internal struggles. Throughout her life, the avant-garde artist talked openly about experiencing hallucinations, which began when she was a young child and led her to art. She also lived voluntarily at a psychiatric facility in Tokyo from the 1970s until her death.
That 2017 exhibit was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s modern and contemporary art museum, which also curated the show at Wrightwood.
In the new show, three of Kusama’s iconic works — two mirrored rooms and one large pumpkin sculpture — are presented alongside two of her art peers, Mary Bauermeister and Niki de Saint Phalle. Each of the women was a trailblazing 20th-century artist who forged careers at a time when the art world was still overwhelmingly male-dominated.
Plus, each of the women explored their own inner worlds and thought about how to immerse audiences in their work, including Bauermeister’s optical boxes, two of which are featured in the show and require a viewer to peer through a lens to catch sight of the drawing beneath.
Shown together, it allows audiences to understand Kusama’s work in the context of what else was happening in the art world throughout the 1950s and ’60s, a period in which all three of the women lived in New York. And already the Chicago show is attracting attention; Wrightwood staff say it is the most preregistrations they have ever had for an exhibition.
“People know Kusama really well, but we said it would be really great to spread out and look at who else was doing this,” said curator Betsy Johnson, who works at the Hirshhorn. “Who have [people] maybe not heard of yet? Who can we put in Kusama’s company? And it very quickly came to the fore that Niki de Saint-Phalle and Mary Bauermeister were just such a good fit.”
While Kusama reached certified superstar status in her later years of life, she was not without controversy. After her death in August, racist anti-Black comments she wrote in her autobiography resurfaced. Vice’s Dexter Thomas pointed out in 2017 that that section was removed from the English-language translation of the text. Thomas, who is Black, also reported on being banned from Kusama’s studio.
Kusama issued an apology in 2023, saying in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, “I deeply regret using hurtful and offensive language in my book. My message has always been one of love, hope, compassion, and respect for all people. My lifelong intention has been to lift up humanity through my art. I apologize for the pain I have caused.”
Johnson, who pointed both to Kusama’s ongoing mental illness and upbringing in a homogeneous culture, said the new Wrightwood exhibit does not directly address Kusama’s past comments.
“We definitely come upon these very unique individuals who may have mental illness, as Kusama did, and so their interactions with society are maybe not always along the same lines as one would hope,” Johnson said. “I think, in addition to her mental illness, there were probably also cultural conditions that were probably more challenging for her, but I do know that she did apologize, later in life, for making racist comments.”
The show at Wrightwood is the third collaboration between the Chicago museum and the Hirshhorn; previous shows included a 2018 display of Ai Weiwei’s “TRACE” and a 2022 show called “Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green).”
The museum, which is privately owned by prominent philanthropist and Democratic megadonor Fred Eychaner, sits along a residential block, in a building that was reimagined by the renowned architect Tadao Ando. The museum has been looking to expand its footprint recently, but faces a court challenge in doing so.
Still, due to its ownership model, the museum has been able to take bolder swings at a time when many museums are facing pressures, like the Smithsonian, which has been scrutinized by the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Lonnie Bunch III announced he will step down as the head of the Smithsonian. Amid his tenure, he tried to maintain the museum’s independence amid an internal review of the Smithsonian initiated by the administration “to assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.”
Johnson said working with Wrightwood is a welcome chance to show off pieces of the Hirshhorn’s collection and bring the work to a Midwestern audience.
“They really seem to be very driven to be showcasing artists with voices advocating for change and advocating for the greater good, and I think that’s really amazing,” Johnson said.
Also on view at Wrightwood this fall is Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming’s show, “Everyday War,” an immersive, large-scale video installation, adapted from work shown at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
For Johnson, stepping into one of Kusama’s expansive mirrored rooms is like crossing a threshold into a world with seemingly no limits in sight.
“You just have a heightened awareness, which is something that I think we all crave. We move through life so quickly that these things that kind of cause us to stop and take stock of where we are, it sparks a curiosity,” Johnson said. “And I think that kind of curiosity is something that we all need a little bit more of in our lives.”
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.