Selby Gardens to feature work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and Georgia O'Keeffe

Visitors to Selby Botanical Gardens can expect to see some polka dots around the grounds this winter with the opening of “Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe,” the eighth presentation in its annual Jean and Alfred Goldstein Exhibition series.

Running Feb. 11-June 30 at the downtown Selby campus, the show will feature work by the renowned Japanese conceptual artist Kusama tied to her relationship with her mentor Georgia O’Keeffe. It also will feature photos and lithographs by O’Keeffe.

The annual exhibitions connect nature-inspired work by prominent artists with horticultural displays created by the Selby staff that emulate the artists’ artistic style and vision. The new show will feature plant and flower displays in the style of both Kusama and O’Keeffe.

Past shows have featured works by Andy Warhol, Paul Gaugin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, Salvador Dali, as well as this year’s glass works of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Kusama “has become one of the world’s most influential contemporary artists and cultural figures,” said Selby President and CEO Jennifer Rominiecki said in a statement. “The exhibition will emphasize the meaningful connection between Kusama and fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe, based on their personal correspondence at a critical point in Kusama’s artistic development.”

She added that the show “will explore the ways in which the work of both artists is rooted in nature, befitting an art and horticultural experience set in a botanical garden.”

The 94-year-old Kusama grew up in Japan where she began seeking advice from other artists on how to advance her career. Rominiecki said she wrote to O’Keeffe, who gave Kusama the courage to pursue her career in New York.

Kusama is best known for sculptures and installations, but also creates painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry and fiction. She has been considered the top-selling female artist and the world’s most successful living artist. Her work often features polka dots.

Keith D. Monda, a trustee of Selby Gardens, is the key lender to the exhibition, which will feature work on loan from Richard and Ellen Sandor and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Kusama’s large-scale “Infinity of Dots” was displayed at The Ringling in 2019 and is a promised gift from Monda to the museum, which has made it available to Selby.

It is a four-panel acrylic painting, which Herald-Tribune visual art critic Marty Fugate said “resembles a random assortment of green Ping-Pong balls floating in a sea of India ink.” He said her work “has a psychedelic punch... Her entire artistic career flows out of a hallucinatory experience. Blake saw eternity in a grain of sand; Kusama saw infinity in an array of dots.”

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Selby Gardens to highlight work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama