Exceptionally rare first edition of Yayoi Kusama’s cult periodical, Kusama Presents an Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty from 1969. An important piece of counterculture ephemera – it represented the intersection of tabloid pornography, underground publishing, and the art world which formed during the creatively fertile years of the late 1960s. Published at the time of Kusama’s revolutionary happenings in New York, and in the same year as her 1969 work Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead, where the artist paint dots on participants’ naked bodies in an unauthorized performance in the fountain of the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. These happenings, which often involved public nudity sort out to disassemble boundaries of identity, sexuality and the body.

This first issue of Kusama Presents an Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty was made up of 24 pages, and included the following features: A Vote for Kusama by Bob Francis, Nude Happening on Wall Street, Original Kusama Creations with photographs by Nikko Karant. Mother-In-Law by The Executive, Sex, Kusama at Work, Dr. Domination, Do Your Thing, Kusama's Orgy Creations in Action. Anyway You Look At It, It's A Kusama Happening / Kusama Stages a Happening at the U.N. Photographs by Bob Sabin, Stan Goldstein, Minoru Aoki, Herbert Behrens, Peter Moore, Lou Palou.