Forget Yourself and Become One with Nature! Art Lecture

Forget Yourself and Become One with Nature!

Lecture by: Alexandra Munroe, PhD, Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts, Guggenheim Museum

Join us at 7:30 pm on Thursday, September 25 at the UTD Crow Museum – Athenaeum for a special opportunity to delve deeper into the world of Yayoi Kusama.

Since her earliest drawings of flowers, Kusama has been fixated on what she calls the “forever” aspect of nature, a kind of “mysterious energy or feeling in the infinity.”  This vision of cosmic nature has driven her obsessive creativity over the last seven decades of art-making, culminating in DMA’s immersive Pumpkin Infinity Room installation. In this talk, Alexandra Munroe discusses Kusama’s use of nature as a radical integration of art, science, and mysticism.  She poses that Kusama’s self-described shamanism expresses an ecofeminist and panpsychic world view – the idea that the universe is conscious and everything in it, from quarks to plants to humans to stars, is vitally interconnected.

Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D. is an award-winning curator, Asia scholar and author focusing on art, culture and institutional global strategy. She is Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, where she leads the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative and serves as a senior founding curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Since then, Munroe has worked on over forty exhibitions and is recognized for her pioneering scholarship on artists Cai Guo Qiang, Lee Ufan, Daido Moriyama, Yoko Ono, and Yu Hong among others, and for bringing such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, Japanese otaku culture, and Chinese conceptual art to international attention. In 1989, she curated Kusama’s first international museum retrospective; its scholarly catalogue and critical applause instigated the global Kusama boom. Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (2017), which Artnews named as Top 25 most influential shows of the decade. Her exhibition, Yu Hong; Another One Bites the Dust, was named as among the Top 8 Hits of the 2024 Venice Biennale by the New York Times.

Munroe received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan in recognition of her contributions to Japanese art; and was the 2024 recipient of the Japan Society Award and the 2025 Asia Society Arts Game Changer Award. She is Chair of the Aspen Music Festival and School and a trustee of Open to Debate and the American Academy in Rome.