Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
The wildly popular exhibit “One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection” at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will close on July 16 after more than a year — and no, it won’t be extended again.
How does one summarize the impact of this exhibit, which broke attendance records since it opened in April 2022 and led to countless polka-dot-backed Instagram selfies? To help answer this question, WAMU/DCist spoke with Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu and the exhibit’s curator, Betsy Johnson, about the legacy of the Kusama exhibit and what comes next for the Hirshhorn, one of the nation’s leading contemporary art museums.
“One With Eternity,” attracted over 480,000 visitors, triple 2017’s “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” exhibit, which ran for three months at the museum located on the National Mall and drew over 160,000 visitors. By comparison, “it’s allowed us to share Kusama with a much larger audience than we were able to with our 2017 show,” Johnson says.
Collectively, the exhibits contributed to a new appreciation for Kusama’s work and gave the 94-year-old Japanese American artist her due credit, says Chiu. The exhibits also drew visitors to the work of other artists in the Hirshhorn collection, such as the French conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, she adds.
“In some ways, Kusama [opened] the way for some visitors to see other kinds of artwork or artists that they would not have otherwise thought they would be...
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