After a miserable winter, Yayoi Kusama’s ecstatic grotesques at the New York Botanical Garden come as a vital reprieve. Originally scheduled to open a year ago but foreclosed by the pandemic, this explosion of joy is even more welcome now that spring comes bundled with hesitant optimism. The 92-year-old Kusama’s hallucinogenic blooms, leaping up among young flowers, feel right for this moment of giddiness and anxiety. A more perfect pairing of artist and venue is hard to imagine. Kusama’s sculptures are sprinkled among groves and bowers. Trees sport tunics of polka dots. A pumpkin as big as a bus dances on squid-like tentacles before a fluffy screen of cherries. Anthropomorphic tulips pullulate in a lotus pond, colossal stems coiling, heads opening to reveal snakelike stamens. We wander, like dreaming children, in a wonderland of her creation — a delightful place to spend an afternoon, even if you wouldn’t want to live there. Kusama grew up surrounded by plants, and their forms imprinted themselves on her imagination. Her maternal grandparents owned and operated a nursery in Matsumoto, Japan, which supplied fresh vegetables to a hungry population during the second world war. As a child, she lodged herself in the family’s seed-harvesting grounds and filled sketchbooks with botanical drawings. In some, she rendered their beauty with meticulous objectivity; in others she abstracted it into large biomorphic forms or animate, cell-like shapes. Read more