Yayoi Kusama Whitney Biennial 2004 - Narcissus Garden

Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, presents installations by Paul McCarthy, Liz Craft, Olav Westphalen, David Altmejd, assume vivid astro focus, David Muller, and Yayoi Kusama for the 2004 Biennial Exhibition. Building upon the outdoor presentation of Biennial works in 2002, this show includes artists’ site-specific reactions to Central Park as well as several sculptural projects that were conceived independently of location. For the first time, the exhibition includes a weekend event of openings and participatory artists’ projects in the park.

Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, an installation of floating mirrored balls in the Conservatory Water, connects back to her notorious Narcissus Garden for the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 when the artist was censured for selling 1,500 mirrored globes under a sign that read “Your Narcissism for Sale.” Over the past three decades, Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) has often revisited mirrored forms in her work, exploring notions of infinity, illusion, and repetition in discrete sculptures and room-size installations, as in the recent The Fireflies on the Water (2002), also part of the Whitney Biennial 2004.