Polka Dot Madness

We have been going crazy with Polka Dots in Fourth grade!!!!   Polka dots are invading my dreams and keeping me up at night!!  

Our Fourth Grade artists examined the art of Yayoi Kusama.  Yayoi Kusama has been called the “Queen of Polka Dots.”  Her art is absolutely filled with polka dots. In fact, most of the time, SHE is covered in polka dots.! Patterns, polka dots, bold colors and interactive installation pieces – this is the art of Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama (born March 22,1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting,collage, sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her  interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern.  She came to New York in the late 1950’s and had a great influence on Pop Artist’s Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Although she was largely forgotten after leaving the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan. Polka dots and pumpkins are an important motif in Yayoi Kusama’s work, a fascination that extends from the artist’s childhood during the years of World War Two. Her family’s business was in the grocery industry, and the Kusama storehouse was always full of pumpkins. Even though she became sick of eating them all the time, Kusama has been fascinated with the pumpkin’s irregular, bulbous form.

For our art project, we looked at her art, specifically her “Infinity Nets” and pumpkin paintings. Infinity Nets look like a mass of small dots covering the picture plane. Next, we studied her pumpkin pictures and talked about the dot placement and size and the interesting shapes she used to create pumpkin forms.

Finally, we watched a time lapse video of her exhibit at the Tate Museum called the “Obliteration Room”. Guests to the museum were invited to take part in a free interactive project in which they can help transform a blank white room into a spotty, dotty and colorful space with thousands of polka dots. Visitors entered an entirely white space, furnished as a monochrome living room, and were invited to cover it with multi-colored stickers. Over the course of a few weeks the room is transformed from a blank canvas into an explosion of color, with thousands of spots stuck over every surface by children and their families.  I painted a classroom chair white and each time they attended art students were given dots to stick onto the chair in any arrangement they chose.  The finished project is AWESOME, and everyone wants to sit on it!