Connecting the Dots

Action Pact 2022: Ready, Resilient, Reinvented begins this month at institutions and publicly accessible sites all over Boston. It focuses a cultural lens on climate change in our city and invites us to imagine our future in a very changed world, with the help of local artists, storytellers, landscapes, citizen scientists, and historians.

By Amy Longsworth, Executive Director, Boston Green Ribbon Commission

The 93 year old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots made me question my boundaries.  Polka dots on the background, the foreground, on all bodies and objects, obscuring the usual rules that guide perception of distance and scale, confusing the distinction between ceiling and floor, close and far, object and self.

I “met” Kusama through my daughter, who wrote about her for an art history class and became fascinated by the artist’s obsessively repeated patterns.  Kusama used her art to calm herself from intense anxiety and hallucinations she began to experience in childhood.  Her work is now shown all over the world.  

In 2016 my daughter and I visited the mind-blowing Benesse House Museum on Japan’s Island of Naoshima.  Designed by architect Tadeo Ando, artworks are scattered throughout the buildings and along the surrounding shore, forests, and hills.  

At water’s edge sat one of Kusama’s signature polka dot pumpkin sculptures.  The pumpkin -- so earth-bound, so dotted, against the shimmering backdrop of the Seto Inland Sea – was literally the poster image for Benesse.  I framed the iconic shot with my own camera, including my daughter in it.  We were thrilled to be so close to a Kusama work, and the pumpkin became a visual trope for our trip. 

Kusama’s dots showed up in Boston in 2019 at the ICA’s painstakingly mounted recent acquisition: Love Is Calling.  Kusama’s fragile work consists of plastic inflated psychedelic stalagmites and stalactites – polka dotted, of course – in a small cubic room.  I walked in and lost my sense of external reality; none of the usual boundary markers existed.  What remained was just… love, I suppose.

In 2021 a typhoon toppled Kusama’s pumpkin from the Benesse House pier and beat it up in the surf.  Typhoons are intensifying in Japan’s Inland Sea, and in photos Pumpkin looked undignified with its bottom exposed.  It was painful to watch internet videos of the destructive ravages of climate change hurting something I cared about.  There were no boundaries between us.