At 97 years old, Yayoi Kusama shows no signs of slowing down. The Cincinnati Art Museum has just opened its doors to one of her most celebrated Infinity Mirror Rooms, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, and the result is exactly as disorienting and beautiful as the title suggests.
First created in 2016 and on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art, the installation fills a darkened gallery with dozens of yellow gourds of varying sizes, each covered in Kusama's signature black polka dots. Mirrors line every surface, walls and ceiling and floor, transforming a modest room into what feels like an endless field of glowing pumpkins stretching into eternity. Visitors enter two at a time, and the doors close behind them for exactly ninety seconds. That is all the time Kusama intends you to have.
The brevity is deliberate. Dr Ainsley Cameron, the museum's director of curatorial affairs and the exhibition's curator, explains that the timed entry respects both the artist's vision and the intensity of the experience. Kusama has long described her work as a form of self-obliteration, a way of dissolving the boundary between viewer and artwork until the self disappears entirely. Inside the mirror room, surrounded by infinite reflections of yourself among an endless sea of pumpkins, the concept becomes physical reality.
The pumpkin has been a recurring symbol throughout Kusama's seven-decade career. Born in 1929 in rural Matsumoto, Japan, she spent her childhood in her family's greenhouse surrounded by gourds, an experience she has credited with seeding the visual vocabulary that would later define her art. She has described the pumpkin as a form of self-portraiture, a shape that represents both her anxieties and her consolations. In the mirror room, those personal symbols become universal. Every visitor becomes part of the infinite pattern.
Alongside the mirror room, the exhibition presents a rare assemblage of twelve Pumpkin acrylic paintings on canvas, created between 1990 and 2004, on loan from the Masterworks Foundation. These works provide a quieter counterpoint to the sensory overload of the installation, tracing Kusama's evolution from repetitive abstraction to something more meditative and restrained. The paintings are displayed in the queue area, giving visitors something to study while they wait.
Cincinnati is overdue for a Kusama exhibition of this scale. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms have drawn blockbuster crowds at institutions across the United States, from the Hirshhorn in Washington to the Broad in Los Angeles, and the Cincinnati presentation has been in the works for years. Cameron Kitchin, the museum's director, has spoken about the importance of bringing Kusama's work to a region that has never before hosted one of her immersive environments, framing it as both an artistic and a wellness offering, a chance for visitors to briefly leave behind the relentless noise of daily life and enter a space designed purely for wonder.
Yayoi Kusama: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins runs at the Cincinnati Art Museum through 18 October 2026. Tickets are $17 for adults, with free admission for members and during Thursday evening hours.
