There’s not much Yayoi Kusama to be found in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s splashy imported blockbuster currently entertaining very long lineups on its fourth and fifth floors.

Why that matters, one could argue, is a matter of curatorial inclination: Why muddy the art — the glorious, seductive, out-of-this-world art — with the clunky particulars of an artist’s life? Aren’t we here to be transported to a higher plane, not remain stuck to the ground?

For museums, being hands-off has always been the easy way out. Step aside and let the show stand on its own, which Infinity Mirrors does admirably well. But Kusama isn’t an artist who disappears behind her work so neatly.

Wracked by anxiety and living for the past 40 years in a psychiatric institution in Japan, Kusama has been frank about her battles with mental illness for decades. Her travails have been the generator of much of her work, as she built through her art an escape from its shackles into a limitless cosmos. Her ascension to that higher plane has been fuelled by her struggles here on earth, and the two can’t be undone.

“Yayoi Kusama is more or less the patron saint of mental illness and the arts,” said Claudette Abrams, the curator for Workman Arts, a venerable arts non-profit in Toronto that works with artists and mental health. “There would have been so many entry points for us to engage. So I do think it’s a missed opportunity.”

The exhibition, organized by Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, can of course be whatever it likes and what it seems to like most is positioning Kusama in the larger art historical continuum. Hype aside, the exhibition is taut and serious-minded, rooting Kusama within the dawning revolutions of Minimalism and performance art in 1960s New York. At the same time, while it offers photographs and documentation of her time there, it offers none after her permanent return to Japan, in 1973, where she willingly entered an institution for anxiety and depression.

The artist herself, according to the Hirshhorn, decided that mental health was “not an aspect to her life that she chose to highlight in this show,” a spokesperson for the museum said. “The ideas and philosophies of her artwork stand on their own as remarkable accomplishments, and this exhibition is much more about her esthetics, technology and artistic development than mental health.”

What’s missing, it seems, is something to tether Kusama to the city itself. Prior big blockbuster shows here have trod local turf carefully, looking for points of connection. Basquiat: Now’s the time in 2015 would have seemed like a lunar landing module — a sealed-box, imported-superstar exhibition, with no connection to the place itself — had the museum not reached deep into the city’s Black community to establish points of communion.

For months, the museum invited members of UNITY Charity, a non-profit that engages at-risk youth with hip-hop culture, to perform a weekly spoken word/beatbox session. It also partnered with the Michaëlle Jean Foundation, the Environics Institute’s Black Experience Project and the NIA Centre for the Arts for the Scratch & Mix Project to create an art competition where entries were encouraged to portray empowerment in the Black community here.

For Kusama, there’s been a noticeable absence of such things. Abrams calls it a missed opportunity for meaningful engagement with a community often left in the shadows.

“If we were talking about an exhibition for Black History Month in which there was no engagement with the Black community, or a feminist show where no women were part of the team, there would be an uproar,” Abrams said. “Those are the analogies and they’re real. We are a very specific community. But people have difficulty with conversations around mental illness, which is such a shame. The arts is the best place to have that conversation. Artists are all about cracking open these difficult issues and confronting them.”

Abrams said she had preliminary conversations with the AGO about programming in the fall, but they didn’t lead to firm plans. “We had hoped for maybe a ‘First Thursday’ gig: something prominent, to engage the community. But it didn’t happen and, frankly, I was a little heartbroken.”

When I asked curator Mika Yoshitake about Kusama’s troubled personal narrative, she seemed to suppress a shrug. “In 1989, there was a retrospective that was filtered through her mental illness,” she told me, a little wearily, indicating the question was far from new. “My curatorial framework is that her work, especially the mirror rooms, are important as phenomenological experiences. And the work speaks for itself, too, so I didn’t want to filter it too much through her own experience.”

The interior world of the exhibition surely gives its curator such prerogative (though writing in the Washington Post, critic Philip Kennicott said “(o)ne can understand but not sympathize with the curatorial choice here”). How it connects to the world outside of it — a bigger, messier question — falls under the purview of the museum that hosts it. For its part, the spokesperson at the Hirshhorn said it didn’t restrict any of its exhibition partners regarding their public programming.

At the AGO, curator Adelina Vlas echoed the Hirshhorn, saying the gallery was “very mindful of living artists’ wishes and it is Kusama’s wish to focus on her art.” And the gallery has a long history of making its exhibitions accessible to those with mental health issues through Accessibility for Mental Health Organizations Program, which provides support and specific hours for visitors with such conditions as schizophrenia, dementia and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Support within the gallery isn’t the same as reaching beyond its walls, though. When I asked Judith Koke, the AGO’s former chief of public programming and learning (she left the museum in the fall), she referred to the AGO’s prior record on mental health, while explaining that public programming decisions can be a delicate balance between an array of interests. “Sometimes it’s the estate, sometimes it’s the curator, who might have a very specific idea of what he or she wants people to focus on,” Koke said. “Sometimes it’s as simple as it being something you felt you’ve addressed in another show and you wouldn’t want to repeat yourself.”

A museum’s education department chafing with curatorial intentions is nothing new and it’s the rare exhibition that doesn’t at least see some friction between the two (where education departments seek to explain and connect, curators prefer, if anything, to under-direct viewers, to allow them their own space).

Nonetheless, the disconnect has been felt acutely. Thus far, the AGO is offering a screening of I Adore Myself, a documentary in which Kusama paints 50 large monochrome paintings; and a First Thursdays event, In Living Colours, that deals with different kinds of “immersive art,” of which the Infinity Rooms are a shimmering example. (The restaurant is offering a “curated dinner series,” promoting it with a minimal-looking plate adorned with multi-coloured “polka dot” carrot slices.)

All seems to elide uncomfortable fact: of Kusama’s childhood of emotional abuse and neglect, of her obsessive repetition of forms providing comfort and a way out of the darkness.

“My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings,” Kusama has said.

(“She’s making her work not in spite of her mental illness; she’s making it because of it. It’s symptomatic,” Abrams said.)

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Is Kusama more than her mental illness? Of course. But that also ultimately is the point: to make of her achievements and newly burgeoning fame a shining example for those also afflicted. In a video in the show, Kusama says: “The effect of infinite constant repetition … leads us to finding our ever expanding hope.”

Perhaps Kusama herself is now considering her legacy, which Infinity Mirrors surely advances and seals tightly up. But her saintly presence for a certain community has meaning too. As does its absence.

“Not offering something around this is violating, by omission, a very critical quality that art has, which is to make connections between people. It creates relevance and value,” Abrams said. “They’re interfering with that process. The miracle of her work is that sublime, transporting quality that comes from her struggle. It’s very spiritual, it’s very recovery-based. Why can’t we talk about that?”