Hustlers Grotto

The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street (Kuristofa Danshokutsu) is a masterpiece depicting a world filled with drugs and gay sex. Won Tenth Literary Award for New Writers, Yasei Jidai magazine. Kusama's characters -most obviously Henry in The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street- are Pop-like reductions, stereotypical caricatures of the African American male, the junkie, the homosexual hustler. Like all her subjects both animate and inanimate, her characters are highly eroticized and therefore not "realistic;" like all Pop artists, she forgoes realism in favor of stylization. She is less concerned with drawing out her characters than using them as conduits of an excessive phantasmagoria. (Alexandra Munroe)