The setting for every Washingtonian’s third Tinder photo in 2017, Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective Infinity Mirrors lured more than 14,000 visitors to the Hirshhorn Museum in its first week alone to stick colorful dots on an all-white room, ogle luminescent tentacles, and shut themselves in mirrored rooms filled with pumpkins or hanging lights.
Now, the Japanese artist’s work is coming back for a return engagement at the museum. The Hirshhorn quietly announced in March 2019 that it had acquired Kusama’s earliest infinity room, “Phalli’s Field.” The Hirshhorn purchased the piece from Kusama’s gallery, Ota Fine Arts, in Tokyo for an undisclosed sum, according to The Art Newspaper.
“The exhibition had such an impact on the museum, and we began to think about adding something to the collection,” Chiu told the outlet.
The Hirshhorn has splashed the piece on its homepage with a promise that “Yayoi Kusama is coming to the Hirshhorn collection” in 2020. A spokesperson for the museum declined on Thursday to provide details about how and when Kusama’s work will go on display, and what specifically an exhibition would include.
“Phalli’s Field” came together during the mid 1960s, when Kusama was sewing thousands of polka-dotted phallic shapes and attaching them onto furniture, according to the Hirshhorn. She wanted the viewer to feel swallowed up by these alien-like shapes, but could only sew so many items. Enter the mirrors, which multiplied the effect of those soft stuffed phalluses surrounding the viewer on all sides. As we wrote in 2017 when the piece was at the Hirshhorn, “Phalli’s Field” “feels like waking up inside a bad dream co-produced by Dr. Seuss and Sigmund Freud, a strange balance between whimsy and discomfort.”
It’s unclear whether the Hirshhorn will offer the same free ticketing structure that slammed the museum’s website back in 2017. In the first minute that tickets were made available, more than 58,000 people requested passes. After a few tweaks to the system, patrons could claim timed slots online, or acquire same-day passes in front of the museum. It was the first time in the Hirshhorn’s history that it offered timed passes, and so many patrons ended up signing up that the museum crossed a million visitors in a year for the first time in three decades.
Even with the timed tickets, though, visitors still found lines inside the Hirshhorn’s doors: The museum only allowed a few patrons inside each infinity room at a time, and for less than a minute each. (Even so, that was enough time for one errant selfie-taker to accidentally damage a pumpkin inside one of the rooms.)
“Phalli’s Field” makes four Kusama pieces in permanent residence at the Hirshhorn. One of her unsettling orange pumpkins sits in the Sculpture Garden, and an early drawing, “The Hill,” and sculpture “Flower Overcoat” are in the museum’s collection.
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Lori McCue