Based on her 2015 book, Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular, Prof. Midori Yamamura will discuss Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama and Jewish art dealer Leo Castelli, who both launched their careers in New York’s 1950s multicultural downtown scene, where immigrants from diverse backgrounds converged after the Second World War. By the early 1960s, Kusama was exhibiting together with the Pop and Minimal artists during their formative years. In Europe, she showed with the Dutch Nul and the German Zero artists. However, as the global art market fully took root, the so-called “New American Art” replaced multiculturalism with mostly U.S.-born white male artists, most of whom were represented by a single New York gallery, Leo Castelli, and Kusama became marginalized. This was owing in part largely to the successful efforts of the capitalists’ transnational activities to establish what was in effect a market monopoly. This experience uniquely shaped Kusama’s art, and forced her to invent a singular practice that foreshadowed the politically charged feminist art of the 1970s and queer art, challenging the conventional ideas of gender and sexuality.
Midori Yamamura is an Associate Professor of Art History at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY and an Alcaly/Bodian Distinguished Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center. She specializes in feminist studies, eco-criticism, and global contemporary art, with a focus on Asia and its diaspora. She authored Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press, 2015), co-edited Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles: Arts in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021), and contributed to De-Nin Lee's edited volume Mountains and Rivers (without) End: An Anthology of Eco–Art History in Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).
Yamamura has received several distinctions, including predoctoral fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, as well as a JSPS postdoctoral fellowship. Since 2024, she has been a participant in the CUNY Climate Hub. Her current work explores the intersection of art, economy, and environmental transformation. In Fall 2025, she will be a fellow at the Cordillera Studies Center at the University of the Philippines, Baguio, where she will research and write about the history and the four founding artists of the Baguio Arts Guild.
