Art Vibes: Making meaningful connections to art and culture

One of the final projects of last year’s middle school Art Vibes! club was inspired by the artist Yayoi Kusama. Having learned about Kusama and the radical artistic approach that has thrilled gallery-goers across the world, our club’s girls were given a deceptively simple task:

Take a circle, fill it with dots, and then add it to a larger collaborative work. Each individual dot might be small and distinct, but together they became something greater than the sum of the parts.

That project acquired an unexpected poignancy as a result of recent events.

Recently, the world, and Tennessee in particular, started the process of grieving for Dolly Parton. The following day, the art world was rocked by the death of another talented and impactful woman, Yayoi Kusama. The disparity in the public’s response is not surprising. Dolly Parton reached nearly all through her music, film roles, theme park, and most impactfully through the Imagination Library project. Kusama’s influence is also enormous, but it is less immediately visible, often reaching us through museums, galleries, fashion, and design—cultural spaces that can feel more specialized or less accessible than popular music.

And that is why early encounters like Art Vibes! matter.

Kusama’s work is immediately recognizable: polka dots, pumpkins, repeated patterns, mirrors, intense colors. But beneath the dots are fundamental questions about identity, infinity, repetition, and the place of the individual within the wider world. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms transformed people from individuals looking at art to being embedded within it, a part of the installation itself. Her repeated dots and nets offered other ways to imagine and contemplate infinity.

Our girls did not need to understand all of that to make something worthwhile; they just needed to encounter her work. They looked at Kusama’s art, experimented with repetition and pattern, and then contributed their own circles to a collective composition. Each girl made individual choices about size, density, rhythm, and arrangement. When those circles came together, something happened that could not have happened through any one girl’s work alone. That, too, is a useful lesson from Kusama.

For middle school girls especially, encountering challenging art is not about turning them into art historians or enthusiasts of the avant-garde. Art Vibes! was designed for girls to discover that the worlds of art and culture belong to them, too. Sometimes that means making something beautiful. Sometimes it means making something strange. Sometimes it means not quite ‘getting’ an artist the first time around. And sometimes it means discovering, weeks or years later, that an idea that you first encountered in middle school has stayed with you.

In Art Vibes! we introduce girls to artists whose work is radically different—Alma Thomas, Wassily Kandinsky, Keith Haring, Yoko Ono, Piet Mondrian—and then we ask the girls to do something with what they encounter. They make, experiment, collaborate, question, observe, and wrestle with ideas outside their comfort zones. And they have fun doing it, even when it’s hard.

Dolly and Yayoi’s deaths remind us that cultural legacies are not sustained simply because we admire the person. They are sustained when new people discover their work, respond to it, and remember it, maybe even carrying it somewhere new.

Consider Dolly’s “I Will Always Love You,” which she wrote, recorded, and released decades before Whitney Houston transformed it into a global phenomenon. Dolly’s legacy did not diminish when somebody else made the song her own; it expanded.

Thousands of dots may seem like a small contribution to Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary legacy. But cultural legacies are built one encounter at a time. Every legacy has to begin somewhere. All it takes is a spark of inspiration.