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Accumulation No. 1

Discover more about Yayoi Kusama in the tour below!

To make Accumulation No. 1, her first sculpture, Kusama covered an armchair with scores of hand-sewn stuffed and painted protrusions, which she referred to as phalluses. “I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this obliteration.” When she first exhibited this work in New York, her home throughout the 1960s, critics were, perhaps not surprisingly, shocked by the sexualized transformation of an ordinary domestic object by a female artist.

Accumulation No. 1 is the first in an ongoing series of presciently feminist sculptures by Kusama. When the twenty-nine-year-old artist arrived in N...

1962
Sewn stuffed fabric, paint, and chair fringe
94.0 x 99.1 x 109.2 cm
1182.2012
Image © 2019 Yayoi Kusama
Text © MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Where you'll find this

The Museum of Modern Art
Permanent collection