We love the green polka dots in this down-at-heels kitchen, a perfect way to jazz up a wall. It got us thinking about their cosmic meaning and how to make them without laboriously holding up stencils.
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Yayoi Kusama’s Reflections on the Year 2020
Early on in the pandemic, Yayoi Kusama sent out a defiant message “to the whole world”. We found it deeply heartening in the face of the very dark time. Recently, she shared this affirming message with her reflections on the year 2020…
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Yayoi Kusama’s Defiant Message To Covid-19
Today the very uplifting MESSAGE FROM YAYOI KUSAMA TO THE WHOLE WORLD flew over our transom: a poem that acts as a call to arms, waking us from the shock of quarantine…A healing dose of Kusama’s own Art Medicine.
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Yayoi Kusama Transforms Obsession and Accumulation into Art and Medicine
For decades nintey-year-old artist Yayoi Kusama has embraced the culturally taboo practices of obsession and accumulation, using them as a means of transformation and healing. Her remarkable “art medicine” has been her balm for mental illness.
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yayoi kusama does halloween: ‘the spirit of the pumpkins descend into the heavens’
For Halloween, we’re loving pumpkins transformed by Yayoi Kusama’s unique vision. She made them wondrous in ways no one had ever imagined and changed the way we see them forever.
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Million Dollar Idea: Yayoi Kusama Bandaids (Art Medicine)
When I first saw the image of a Yayoi Kusama skateboard, I thought: How swell: Yayoi Kusama BANDAIDS, an idea made even more meaningful by Kusama’s practice of art medicine.
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Visit Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms
Since we may not be able to get to the Hirshhorn Museum to see Yayoi Kusama’s six Infinity Room installations in person, we were happy that NPR made this short video…to give us a glimpse of infinity
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Gift: Yayoi Kusama’s The Little Mermaid for Adults and Children
The inspired pairing of Yayoi Kusama’s drawings with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale has resulted in a unique experience. The text and brilliantly patterned images infiltrate the senses in unexpected ways.
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Finding Your Personal Medicine (Yayoi Kusama)
When we stumbled on an image of the polka-dot cloth-wrapped trees in Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary Ascension of the Polka Dots on the Trees, we felt instant joy and astonishment and were reminded once again of Kusama’s use of art as her own medicine. It got us thinking about vocations, passions, practices, arts that actually help us to live in the world.
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Yayoi Kusama’s Fab Lessons in Dots
We’ve posted about Japanese artist Yoyoi Kusama a number of times in the past, so taken were we with her view of art as medicine; losing herself in making art — “self-obliteration”— is her way of relieving illness. We have been especially transfixed by her repetitive use of dots in her artwork. In “The Obliteration Room”, currently on view…
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The Art of Yayoi Kusama: Obsession Becomes Medicine
Although we’ve long been fans of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, now in her nineties, we had no idea of the power of her influence, dedication and work until we saw this remarkable 7-minute video interview (which flies by). She shows how two maligned concepts — obsession and accumulation — have been the means of transformation and healing for her.
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yayoi kusama’s art-medicine
In The Art of the Flame-Out, Carl Swanson writes about visionary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s return to the New York Art scene after 40 years in a mental-hospital exile. But whatever you make of her retreat into a psych ward, her mantra was always “self-obliteration”—to lose herself in the work, or to the work, to save herself.…
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The Power of Self-Administered Placebos (Kevin Kelly, Ted Kaptchuk)
Writing in the Recommendo newsletter, Kevin Kelly, whose great, useful ideas we’ve been following for years, described his latest find: placebo pills that he buys on Amazon. He’s found them to be helpful to alleviate certain symptoms, echoing research by Ted Kaptchuk and others about the efficacy of open-label placebos.
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Make Your Own Fire Cider for Well-Being, Cocktails, Cooking
We learned a lot from ‘How to Create Your Own Herbal Tinctures’, including Jade Mark’s compelling recipe for Fire Cider.
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Etsy Studio for Hard-to-Find Project and Craft Supplies + Ideas
When we were searching for hardware for a bag we are prototyping, we scoured New York City’s garment district and the internet for sources. We were surprised to find the most complete offerings at Etsy. The digital marketplace of crafters and sellers has expanded…
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Improvised Life’s Thoughtful Un-Gift Guide
Here’s our list of things we think are worth giving for the way they expand minds/hearts/creativity, or are just downright useful…
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Instructions for a Tumultuous Election Day
Has any election in America’s history created as much anxiety as this one? It seems like our very lives are on the line. So we’ve put together some instructions for navigating Election Day.
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james turrell’s aten reign: ‘other seeing’
(Video link here.) After we saw artist James Turrell‘s wondrous installation of light at the Guggenheim Museum, we looked hard to find a video that could give some semblance of what it’s like. Turrell completely transformed Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiralling rotunda into something completely other. We recommend watching this succinct two minutes full screen: what…
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sublime sticker-decorated room
For an interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama created a totally white room as a palette for visiting children to embellish as they pleased with colored dot stickers; ultimately thousands of stickers were used, to make bulls-eyes, whorls, dribbles and overlapping hits of color. The results of this…
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Holiday Uplift During the 4th Wave (Eddie Izzard, James Brown, Yoko Ono, Toni Morrison, Shirazeh Houshiary)
What started with the hopeful return to old ways of celebrating the holiday season suddenly turned into exhaustion and disappointment at yet another wave of a scary variant. Again. Right now, we want relief from it all: momentary escape, joy, illumination, uplift.
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