On June 4, 1962, the Green Gallery in New York opened a prophetic group show featuring Andy Warhol's first silk-screened dollar bills, Robert Morris's minimalist gray slab, and Yayoi Kusama's sofa covered in cloth penises — described by the New York Times as "thousands of blanched frankfurters." The review focused on Kusama, then in her first artistic incarnation, overshadowing Warhol and Morris. Born in Japan in 1929 into wealth and familial dysfunction, Kusama moved to the United States by 1957. Within 18 months, her vast "Infinity Nets" canvases placed her on New York's cutting edge, precursors to her later "Infinity Rooms" and influences on Warhol and Agnes Martin.

Her phallic "Accumulations" became early feminist art. Kusama cultivated a public persona years before Warhol, posing nude with dots and staging spectacles painting dots on hippies. By 1965, Japanese media called her a dedicated experimentalist in New York's "dizzy whirl of avant-garde activities." After returning to Tokyo in the early 1970s, mental illness led her to check into a private asylum, where she lived for most of the next 15 years.

By 1984, she was "only vaguely remembered." Her 1989 re-emergence as "Kusama 2.0" made her illness central to her reception, though her dot-covered pumpkins and flowers continued proliferating.