Pictured: The Mirage Display at Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O'Keeffe. Photo Courtesy of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

What does it mean to connect the dots? At the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens’ Downtown Campus, the Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit, invites visitors to explore the concept of interconnectedness by celebrating and creating visual representations of the two artists’ extraordinary relationship.

At first glance, the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, a modernist American painter best known for her compelling and abstract depictions of flowers and bones, as well as urban and natural landscapes, appear to have little in common with those of Yayoi Kusama. Born 42 years after O’Keeffe, Japanese artist Kusama has achieved notoriety for her colorful and playful paintings, sculptures and immersive works, like the Infinity Mirror Rooms. Both women experienced nature, giving them a unique artistic perspective, at an early age. O’Keeffe grew up on a Wisconsin farm and Kusama was raised against the backdrop of her family’s plant nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. As a young artist, Kusama found a book of O’Keeffe’s paintings in a local bookstore and decided to write a letter to her, in hopes of learning how to come and work in the United States. Visitors can see that letter, to which O’Keeffe did reply, on display in the exhibit. The two established a dialogue that was instrumental in inspiring Kusama to move to the United States where she developed her career.

The exhibit is divided into ten displays spread across the downtown campus. Each display highlights motifs and themes found in the works of both artists, oftentimes tying them together. “Kusama is very much interested in pattern and repetition and is most famous for the use of the polka dot,” says Vice President for Visitor Engagement and Chief Museum Curator David Berry. “We have not used polka dots, but we have used sources in nature that are either round or spherical.” One delightful play on the dot concept can be found in the tropical conservatory, where large spheres seem to float on the top of a goldfish-filled pond. The fish can swim up and into the spheres, which magnify their appearance. In another display, epiphytes, a research specialty of Selby Gardens which they define as “a plant which grows upon another plant, but does not take anything from it like a parasite would,” hang like stars dotting the night sky above visitors. Some displays feature desert dwellers, like cactuses, which call to mind O’Keeffe’s experience living and working in New Mexico. As a nod to Kusama, the cactuses are arranged in a repetitive pattern.

Each display features a QR code, which visitors can scan to reveal a quote from one of the artists relating to that portion of the exhibit, inviting them to enter into the dialogue with the artists. In the Museum of Botany and the Arts, works by O’Keeffe and Kusama and snippets of their writings bring the exhibition full circle, allowing guests to connect the dots between art, nature, the lives of two great and impactful artists and maybe even themselves.

Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens’ Downtown Campus, 1534 Mound St., Sarasota, 941-366-573, selby.org.

Pictured: The Mirage Display at Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O'Keeffe. Photo Courtesy of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

Yayoi Kusama: A Letter to Georgia O'Keeffe