The Easel

1st September 2026

A Tribute to Yayoi Kusama

Julien Delagrange | Art Institute of Chicago | 28th September 2026

After a traumatic childhood, Kusama found that art helped with her mental health issues. Moving to the US in 1957, she created her famous art forms – phallic-shaped soft sculptures, infinity mirror rooms, pumpkin sculptures and fields of dots. Returning to Japan in 1973 she was seen as an embarrassment, but a later career revival brought huge fame. Her themes of infinity and self-obliteration reflected a desire to be “dissolved into the pattern.” Said she, “I am just another dot in the world.” Images are here.

Mary Heilmann, Who Revivified Abstract Painting, Dies at 86

Andrew Russeth | Artnet | 17th September 2026

After training in California and a brief foray into ceramics, Heilmann moved to New York intent on “making it big” in sculpture. She didn’t, and in 1969 took up the supposedly dying medium of painting. Her “proudly unpolished” abstractions poked fun at the serious geometries of minimalism while radiating a “joyful humanity”. She continued to “uncork strange delights” until institutional recognition finally arrived in her late-60s.  Heilmann had “one of the defining art practices of her era”.

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