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Put a Yayoi Kusama on Your Wall for Just $200—or Take It for a Ride

Put a Yayoi Kusama on Your Wall for Just $200—or Take It for a Ride

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Just as skateboarding has long been adjacent to mainstream sporting but not quite a part of it, Yayoi Kusama, with her dazzling Infinity Mirror Rooms and landscapes of polka-dotted pumpkins, was an art world outsider for many of her early years. Now a collaboration with the MoMA Design Store will allow fans to take home a piece of her idiosyncratic vision—or even ride off on it. The 89-year-old Japanese artist has emblazoned her beloved dots, in vibrant shades of yellow and black or red and white, on the decks of $200 skateboards. The release is perfectly timed: Skateboarding makes its debut at the Olympics in 2020 in Tokyo, Kusama’s city of residence and the location of a new museum dedicated to her work.

The Field

• Released in 2017, aSupreme deck adorned with Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #175 (1987) is available through StockX for $495.

• A limited-edition deck from 2012 featuring a bright-pink-and-green work by Keith Haring is listed as new at Chairish for $340.

• The Magritte Foundation and the Skateroom offer a $350 deck, limited to 250 pieces, adorned with surrealist painter René Magritte’s Son of Man.

The Case

These decks are certainly grindable on the street, but they’re better suited for your walls. Look at the artist partnerships from Supreme, a cult skate brand in its own right that released limited-edition decks with Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Damien Hirst for more than a decade. All the decks quickly sold out; in the case of the Hirst skateboards, a triptych, resale prices have topped $10,000. Kusama’s paintings have garnered $7 million at auction, and her Infinity Mirror Room exhibitions consistently sell out. If you like her work, consider this a route to art cred—and street cred—for not a lot of cash. $200; store.moma.org

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net, Chris Rovzar

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