Kusama in 1968. (Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Yayoi Kusama will join David Zwirner, The New York Times' Carol Vogel writes. Shortly after Art Basel Miami Beach last year, The Art Newspaper reported that she was parting ways with Gagosian Gallery. She had her first one-person show with the gallery in 2009. A recent profile of Mr. Gagosian in New York magazine said that a representative for the artist told the gallery last summer that she wanted to cease working together. In late December, the German newspaper Die Welt reported the widely circulating rumor that Ms. Kusama was set to join Zwirner in New York. And now the official word has arrived.

The news comes shortly after Jeff Koons said that he would do a show with Zwirner in New York, though he has also said that he will continue to work with Gagosian and Sonnabend Gallery.

Ms. Vogel confirms that Ms. Kusama will continue to work with Victoria Miro in London, where Zwirner recently opened a space.

The excitement never ends in Chelsea.

A Kusama display and wax figure at a Louis Vuitton store in Hong Kong. (Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

Last year was a wild one for relations between artists and their galleries. Numerous burgeoning talents signed up with major New York dealers; meanwhile, a handful of established relationships came to abrupt ends, with star players switching teams. There’s no sign things will slow down in 2013, with news of signings of closely watched emerging artists and a rumor that one more major arrangement is in the works.

The big question at the moment is where the artists who left Gagosian at the end of 2012, Damien Hirst and Yayoi Kusama, will end up, in terms of a New York representative. In late December, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that Ms. Kusama is rumored to be in talks to join the David Zwirner gallery, which just opened a space in London and has another space in the works on 20th Street in Chelsea, a block north of its already-massive 19th Street galleries. The rumor about Ms. Kusama, who is renowned for her polka-dotted works, has been making the rounds in New York art circles, though Zwirner’s reps have declined to comment.

If Ms. Kusama makes the move to Zwirner, she may find some familiar company over there. Jeff Koons, who has long shown with Gagosian and Sonnabend, announced in early December that he would do a show there this year. As if Zwirner wasn’t having a good enough start to 2013, Russian art patron Maria Baibakova told the Nowness website, as part of her New Year’s predictions, that she thinks Zwirner “will overcome Larry Gagosian as the number one gallerist in the world” in 2013.

Singh, 'Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Danny Rubin),' 2012. (Courtesy the artist, Metro Pictures, Art:Concept, Monitor Gallery, Sprüth Magers)

In other news, Chelsea’s Metro Pictures gallery has picked up the Bordeaux, France-born, New York-based artist Alexandre Singh, who opens a new show, “The Pledge,” at the Drawing Center on Jan. 17. Though he’s shown widely in Europe, this will be his debut museum exhibition in North America, and his first show in New York since his 2009 gallery debut in the city at Harris Lieberman. Known for slyly comic collages, inspired most recently by interviews that he conducts with people from various disciplines (artists, scientists, filmmakers), Mr. Singh is currently in residency at the Witte de With arts center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, developing a theater piece called The Humans that will hit the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall.

Installation view of Kydd's 2012 video 'Composition Warner Studio.' (Courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery)

Down on the Lower East Side, Nicelle Beauchene, freshly installed in a new two-story Broome Street gallery that she shares with Jack Hanley (they trade floors with each new show) has begun working with the Los Angeles-based video artist Owen Kydd, who makes short, sometimes subtly manipulated, single-shot digital films that resemble photographic still lifes. Ms. Beauchene, who shows emerging artists like painter Sarah Crowner and the photographer and critic Chris Wiley (who introduced her to Mr. Kydd’s work), opens a show with her new signee on Jan. 25.

As Lower East Side and Chelsea galleries continue to expand, there’s no doubt there will be many more new signings to come.

Hoagland's report on the 1968 happening reprinted in 'The Tuscaloosa News.' (Courtesy Google Books)

Earlier today, word came out that Yayoi Kusama will design netting for a condo construction site on West 14th Street, not far from the High Line. It goes up next week. It turns out that Ms. Kusama, who was born in Japan and lived in New York throughout the 1960s, until she moved back to Japan in 1973, has had a lengthy and rich relationship with 14th Street over the years.

The street was the site of Ms. Kusama's first public performance in New York, in 1966, according to Midori Yoshimoto, who writes the following in her Into Performance book:

On the sidewalk outside her loft on East 14th Street, Kusama laid out a white mat filled with red-dot-patterned, stuffed phallic protuberances and lied down on top of it. Wearing a black one-piece dress possibly of her own design and her hair in long braids, she probably intended to present herself as a young girl out of a fairy tale. A sequence of slides indicates that she sometimes moved off the mat and laid her body on both sides of the mat at different times. [The photographer] Hosoe's multiple-exposure technique records the movement of the passersby, most of who seem to have stopped for a moment to look at what Kusama was doing. A tourist bus also stayed for a while so that passengers could see the event.

Fred Wilson told New York Social Diary recently that he lives in the same building today.

Two years later, Ms. Kusama ended up on 14th Street after trying to stage a happening with naked participants on a subway leaving from 23rd Street and 7th Avenue. According to a report from The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland, the artist spotted a midget while waiting and remarked that he would have been a great participant in the happening. The midget apparently circled the group, and dancer James Galotta, thinking this odd, exclaimed, "Oh no. The midget's an undercover cop." (He was right: the policeman had been tipped off to the happening by a radio announcement.) There's a great chase scene in the report.

Eventually Ms. Kusama and her gang escape (the police only wanted to chase them out of their precinct). According to The Post:

"The group descended at the 14th Street stop [at 6th Avenue] and picked a happening spot. On a mezzanine, two attractive girls in their late teens and three mid-20s men disrobed in 35 seconds flat and danced gracefully across the floor. … Miss Kusama painted their bodies with green polka-dots. They dabbed Day-glo on the subway walls…

Forty-four years later, she's designing construction netting for luxury condos less than three blocks away.

A rendering. (Courtesy DDG Partners)

Yayoi Kusama and her work have taken over New York this summer. The Whitney is hosting a retrospective of her work, Louis Vuitton stores are offering accessories with her trademark dots (as well as a creepy life-size wax model of the Japanese master) and her 2004 installation Guidepost to the New Space is on view in Hudson River Park, where Christopher Street ends, thanks to a collaboration between the park's trust, Gagosian Gallery and the Whitney.

Now Ms. Kusama is set to create an artwork that doubles as netting for a condo construction site in the Meatpacking district on West 14th Street, according to The Wall Street Journal. The 120-foot version of her Yellow Trees piece was not cheap. "You have to design the netting, print the netting, install the netting, and we worked with the artists' gallery…there are costs for that," Joe McMillan, chief executive of DDG Partners, which commissioned the project, told the paper. The project's budget is reportedly in the six figures.

The Journal emphasizes that the work, which will go up next week, is visible from the High Line. That makes it only the latest in a flood of artworks that galleries, developers and artists have staged in sight of the elevated walkway in the hope of grabbing the attention of the crowds that flock to it every day.

Some of these pieces have been nice surprises: Matthew Marks and Pace have presented, respectively, Rebecca Warren and Sol LeWitt sculptures on the roofs of their buildings, which are visible from the High Line. But a number of street artists have also staged works on nearby façades and rooftops and their quality, to put it politely, has varied markedly.

From its rendering, the Kusama certainly looks like a winner. But we'll have to see next week.

Update, 1:50 p.m.: It so happens that Ms. Kusama has a long history with 14th Street.

(Courtesy the Whitney Museum)

It should be impossible to make a dull exhibition of work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a feisty 83-year-old whose scale-defying work—”infinity net” paintings, polka-dot installations, happenings, as well as dabblings in media, fashion and commerce—might play equally well in a closet and an arena. Yet the Whitney Museum has managed to put on a tepid retrospective: a dutiful and limited presentation of an artist who is larger than life.

Ms. Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto; her Japan was the one of war brides, American GIs and food shortages. The fragile paintings like Heart (1951) and Fern Kingdom (1953) that she made in the early 1950s using oil, enamel and housepaint as well as sand and—sometimes in place of canvas—seed sacks, on display in two rooms at the Whitney, are sweetly hallucinatory and surrealistic. Her conservative family disapproved of her painting habit, and while the Whitney’s wall text informs viewers that rationing in postwar Japan necessitated the use of such eccentric materials, Ms. Kusama herself recalls that her teenage rebellion took the form of pilfering goods from her parents’ plant nursery business to use as art supplies. The works often feature flower buds, and her hallmark dots start to appear in the painting God of the Wind (1955).

When she decided to move to the U.S., Ms. Kusama went to the American embassy, looked up Georgia O’Keeffe’s address in Who’s Who and wrote one of the determined, slightly deranged missives that would become her calling cards. O’Keeffe’s 1955 reply is on display: “It seems to me very odd that you are so ambitious to show your paintings here. But I wish the best for you.”

She finally made it to New York in 1958, when she was 29, and took up residence in a Zen center. The paintings she made shortly after arriving are still her best: rhythmic, cellular monochromes with surfaces so thick that the oil paint looks like baked porcelain. Her larger artistic project begins in earnest here: patterns cut up and spread out over flat surfaces and, eventually, sculptural forms. Her austere and labor-intensive work made an impression in New York, where the art world was still in thrall to Action Painting. Before long, she’d rented a floor in a Downtown loft where she used an old door for a bed and couldn’t afford milk for coffee but had artist neighbors in the building: Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain and Larry Rivers. A tiny self-portrait from 1959 shows her looking fresh-faced and headstrong.

She was different from her artist peers, though, in that she’d experienced visual and aural hallucinations since around age 12, visions of nets and dots climbing onto her skin that regularly landed her in Bellevue. But her visions’ trippy effects were not unlike the psychedelic experiences the hippies embraced in their quest for counterculture utopia, and she became famous with her next series: happenings, “polka-dot dance parties,” “body festivals” and “impromptu nude-ins” like her Endless Love Show in 1966, which, according to the Whitney’s wall text, featured “pot-smoking, go-go dancing and general carousing until dawn.” Her film Self-Obliteration (1968), a 24-minute psychedelic orgy of lighting effects and shamanistic polka-dotting, shows the tone of rapture that struck a cultural vein. If she rebelled against hierarchic and conservative postwar Japanese society, her promise of “self-obliteration” resonated with the mood of America during Vietnam. Her staged sex parties,in which Ms. Kusama used comely hippie girls and gay call boys as canvases for her endless polka dots, looked political enough for the tabloid press: antiwar, pro-gay, feminist and pro-drug, breaking laws in the name of art.The work found an international audience and the performances traveled to Belgium and Germany. (There’s a “did she or didn’t she?” feel to Ms. Kusama’s participation in the most outré elements of her own work; she claims that she had no interest in sex or drugs: “I absolutely never slept with one of them,” she has said of the scores of young nude dancers who hung around her, but plenty of people went to her performances to get laid.)

The best-curated room at the Whitney is the one occupied by her accumulation sculptures, ordinary objects covered with sculptural forms: there are macaroni suitcases, as well as couches, rowboats, high-heeled shoes and dresses sprouting forests of phallic shapes made of fabric. These are humorous and have a kinky glamour. It would have been nice to see her boat wallpaper, said to have inspired Warhol’s famous cow wallpaper, and the pornographic posters she sold mail-order, with dodgy entrepreneurial flair, once her happenings started to catch on.Articles from the late 1960s show “Miss Kusama” turning up at art events decked out in phalli-covered dresses and handbags.

She had a gift for navigating the weird sexual politics of an era when free love made headlines and yet many women, even in artistic circles, found themselves stuck in their roles as wives and mothers. She lived alone in her loft, a savvy self-promoter who staged prescient and fierce self-portraits in catsuits that still look edgy today. Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic would later toe this flash-a-tit-feminist party line. But the show doesn’t quite capture the flavor of this gaudy fun; the video and fliers on display seem timid in relation to her truly untrammeled self-obsession.Ms.Kusama leveraged her outsider status—a pretty Japanese woman in New York—into drinks with Frank Stella and Salvadore Dali, and a decade-long love affair with the reclusive Joseph Cornell. Works by Cornell from her personal collection are on display, including one that reads: “Fly back to me spring flower and I shall tie a string to you like this butterfly.”

As the show’s high-decibel commercial tie-in with Louis Vuitton makes clear (Marc Jacobs has inducted Ms. Kusama into the blue-chip handbag-artist brotherhood of Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince), she has new resonance these days as a proto-Murakami. (The irony inherent in Louis Vuitton promoting someone who once had as her manifesto “Nudism is the one thing that doesn’t cost anything. Clothes cost money. Kusama will cover your body with polka dots” is, however, well worth pointing out.) The grand dame of Japanese postwar Pop wore dresses with circles cut out of the tits and ass, and a rack of such “orgy dresses” would have been interesting objects to see at the Whitney. As if in reaction to such institutional reserve, Kusama-mania has spilled out onto the streets of New York with an installation at the Christopher Street pier of red and white polka-dotted biomorphic sculptures, and a display inside and on the exterior of Fifth Avenue’s Louis Vuitton store, which has already spread her dots onto the homepages of countless tween fashion bloggers.

Since 1977, Ms. Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Japan. Her 1980s pieces, like the large-scale Cornell Box-like construction Leftover Snow in a Dream (1982), or some lovely, biomorphic plant drawings from the late 1970s, are more introverted, but also more ambitious than her happenings and social sculptures of the ’60s and early ’70s. Her continuing eagerness to be photographed in front of her work makes her, perhaps, the world’s most photographed recluse.

One problem with the Whitney show is that it fails to place Ms. Kusama’s work in relation to either her artistic peers from the past (Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou and Louise Bourgeois come to mind) or to today’s artists like Kembra Phaler and Ryan McGinley, whose brand of naked downtown self-promotion and shamanistic rocked-out art-making seem resonant with Ms. Kusama’s practice. Instead, the Whitney gives us, in the show’s final gallery, Ms. Kusama’s pretty terrible Keith Haring-like recent paintings, low-grade hothouse acrylics hung floor-to-ceiling.

The larger problem, though, is this: in any exhibition, a curator’s sensibility should be evident; this show, which comes to the Whitney after stints at the Tate and Pompidou, feels instead as though it were created by committee. The installation has no instinct for what might be interesting or dramatic, no sense of which projects might look best large or small, and no conviction about what pieces are important and what work just fills a room. The objects themselves do a lot of heavy lifting here, as does the artist’s oversized personality. (She may not be the best artist, but she has panache.) Even the Whitney’s focus on American art is lost here, with most of the revelatory work coming from Ms. Kusama’s lesser-known years in Japan.

There is one pointedly local angle to the show, despite the spotty curation: New York was, and remains, a great place in which to reinvent yourself, as Ms. Kusama did. She was a hard worker, a bit of a hustler and a savvy survivor. Note the 1964 photograph of Ms. Kusama, age 35, in Brooklyn, looking fabulous in a long faux-fur coat, full of affectation and ego, beautiful and confident.

The best moment in the show is her 2002 room-size, romantic, low-fi installation piece Fireflies on the Water. Only one person at a time can enter: alone, with 150 Christmas tree lights mirrored so that they look like a cosmos, you experience an interior as infinity. The Infinity Net paintings and polka dots have this same effect: a little, repeating motif on a simple field can, with a trick of perspective, look like an entire world. This fragility, and willingness to improvise in her seemingly boundless project, is the best of Yayoi Kusama.

editorial@observer.com

Ms. Kusama, 1968. (Courtesy Getty Images)

New York Magazine ran a mini profile of Yayoi Kusama today ahead of her retrospective at the Whitney Museum, which opens this week. The end of the story features an e-mail Q&A with the artist and her translator, in which Ms. Kusama is frank on a number of subjects, among them the fact that she has essentially lived in and around a mental hospital for the past 40 years. Here's a sample:

Why have you decided to remain in the open ward for this long?
I write novels and poems, and I also paint in the hospital. They are my saviors.

Does it bother you that your work is sometimes seen through the lens of mental illness?
I’m not an outsider artist. Although I’m living in a hospital, I buy my own land and have built my own building. And I am now getting ready to make a museum.

...

Do you think that if you’d stayed in New York, you could have surpassed Warhol?
I had already exceeded him during my stay in New York in the sixties. He lived near me and appropriated my ideas, only he was too late because I had already realized them. We don’t hear his name now so much in Japan.

Read the whole thing here.

Still from 'Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots,' 2012. (Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art)

The Whitney just uploaded a short preview of Heather Lenz's upcoming documentary, Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots, about Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, in anticipation of the film's July 12 release. The museum is currently hosting a retrospective of Ms. Kusama's work.

The film takes viewers from her childhood in Japan to her arrival in New York and her breakout 1966 exhibition "Peepshow/Endless Love Show" at Castellane Gallery, for which the artist painted the gallery black and outfitted it with mirrors, a frenetic light installation and windows you could look through. That exhibition "did the job," according to gallerist Richard Castellane. The 83-year-old artist, dressed in a red and white polka-dotted outfit, also mulls over her various obsessions—her "phallus obsessions" and "obsessions of fear"—and broaches the subject of her mental illness, which she attributes to her painting work. It's a beautiful preview, and one that will have you running up to see the Whitney's show, "Fireflies on the Water," which opened June 13.