Friday, February 26, 2026 | 6pm to 7:30pm
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
In-Person: RSVP | Zoom: RSVP
Join distinguished art historians and filmmaker for an insightful panel discussion reflecting on the visionary career and enduring impact of the late avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama.
Featuring Midori Yamamura (Kingsborough Community College/CUNY), author of Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular; Reiko Tomii, co-founder of PoNJA-GenKon and distinguished historian of modern Japanese art; Midori Yoshimoto (New Jersey City University), scholar of postwar Japanese women artists and author of Into Performance; and Heather Lenz, director of the acclaimed biographical documentary KUSAMA: Infinity. Together, this panel brings together the leading authorities who have documented and preserved Kusama’s story. They will examine her transformative journey—from her radical emergence in the 1960s New York avant-garde scene to her world-renowned installations—exploring her pivotal contributions to Pop art, minimalism, performance, and global contemporary art history.
Author Bio
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.
Reiko Tomii is an independent scholar and curator specializing in postwar Japanese art history. Her major curatorial projects include Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum, New York), Century City (Tate Modern, London), and Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles). A dedicated mentor to emerging scholars, she co-founded the international research group PoNJA-GenKon in 2003 with Miwako Tezuka.
Tomii is widely published in modern and contemporary Asian art. Her monograph, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016), received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award and inspired a 2019 exhibition, Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, at Japan Society Gallery in New York. In 2020, she received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government for her international contributions to the field. She is currently working on her next English-language book, Defying the Curse: Japanese-Type Modernism and Belatedness.
Midori Yoshimoto is a professor of art history and gallery director at Kean Jersey City. She specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and its diaspora, focusing on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia. Her 2005 book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, led to numerous publications, including an essay for Yoko Ono One Woman Show (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015). Yoshimoto also co-curated a major survey exhibition on Japanese American artist Shigeko Kubota that toured three museums in Japan from 2021 to 2022; its accompanying catalog, Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota (Kawade Shobo Shinsha), won Japan's Ringa Art Encouragement Award.
Additionally, Yoshimoto co-edited and authored the anthology Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021). She guest-curated Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus at the Japan Society Gallery (2023–24) and recently contributed essays to exhibition catalogs for Minami Tada: Still, shimmering light (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo) and Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945 (MUDAM Luxemburg, Lenbachhaus Munich, and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao).
