Quick Lessons: Yayoi Kusama

21st January 2021 - By Sarah Burns

At the start of the year, I wrote about some of the things I wanted to cover with the children this year, and one of those things was to do more on art with the children. H, in particular, loves to draw and create and Em has a love of drawing too. One of the many benefits of Home Ed is that we can look at things that are outside of the national curriculum.

I decided that we would take a look at a number of artists, just a short session with friends (Via zoom) and create an artists book. My plan is that it allows the children to plot where different artists are from on a world map as well as get to know a range of artists and have a go at working in their style.

The first of those sessions was last week, and it was all about the fascinating Yayoi Kusama.

Why Yayoi Kusama?

I came acrorss Yayoi Kusama in a book, and thought her work with polka dot pumpkins would be a fun and engaging things to recreate with the children. The more I read about her the more interesting I found her and I thought she would be the perfect artist to kick start our project.

Materials Needed

For this session I provided each child with a pumpkin and a range of printouts should they wish to make their own pack of information.

Pumpkins – I used these from Amazon.
Paint to cover pumpkin (I used orange poster paint – two coats was enough)
Black sharpie

For the packs that I put together for the children to complete I used the following:

Famous Artist Research Brochure (from TpT)
Famous Artist Colouring Pages (from TpT)
Famous Artist Paper Dolls (From TpT)
World Map
Flag of Japan and Map from this bundle.

How I ran the Session

First of all I talked about Yayoi Kusama; about her childhood and her work. How she crossed a number of differnet art movements as well as producing a wide range of art from paintings and sculpture to performance and immersive arts. We looked at images of her work and the children had time to draw their favourite thing and to decorate with polka dots in the stlye of Kusama.

We then talked a little more about her work before watching a short video of the infinity rooms that she creates. We talked about those and it was interesting to see which the children chose as their favourites.

We then set out polka dotting our pumpkins – two of my own children did this with black paint and a cotton bud but I think all the others on the call did it with a sharpie. Some of them looked brilliant when they’d finished.

We then all shared our work before asking any questions and saying our good byes.

With my own children we followed up the work a few days later, talking about Kusama and her work and the work we had particuarly enjoyed as well as filling in the bits and pieces to make their books up. We will add each artist to the map as we learn about them over the coming weeks.

Other Useful Resources

There’s a lot of resources available for learning about Yayoi Kusama. I found the book, We Are Artists, useful when I followed up with my own children a few days later when we completed the research booklet and I think I might use this for ideas of other artists to study. There are a number of YouTube clips as well that I found helpful as well as some pages on the Tate website which I have linked below. I have also suggested some brilliant books for artist studies here.