The letter x usually marks the spot, but for artist, filmmaker, and writer Yayoi Kusama, it’s the spot itself that counts—literally.

Since her childhood in World War II Japan, Kusama has been passionate for polka dots, painting them onto herself and a live horse at Woodstock, printing them onto fabrics for the fashion line she launched in the late 1960s, later incorporating them into everything from sculptures to silkscreens to interactive installations. As she explains in her new memoir, Infinity Net (University of Chicago Press), spots are elemental symbols, reducing everyone and everything to atoms: “I paint polka dots on the bodies of people, and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.” Disappearing is a recurring theme in her work, which in part explains her decision to take refuge in a mental hospital in the mid-’70s, when emotional issues derailed the self-styled “Queen of Love and Polka Dots.” She lives there still, working in a studio across the street.

Today, the diminutive avant-garde octogenarian, known for her Kabuki-style maquillage and Mercurochrome-red bobbed wig, is back in the spotlight. Thanks to fans such as Larry Gagosian (his gallery has shown her work since 2007) and Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs (he met Kusama in Tokyo in 2006 and fell in love with what he calls her “painstaking obsession”), the artist is having a renaissance, with her hallmark spots showing up everywhere from museums to handbags.

A solo exhibition called “Yayoi Kusama” runs through September 30 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where her work was first shown in 1961. Dozens of her pieces will be on display, including one from the Whitney’s own collection, Fireflies on the Water, which is shown in magical, disorienting fashion: Hung in a fully mirrored room with a pool at its center, it’s as though viewers are immersed in a swarm of lightning bugs. Sponsored by Louis Vuitton and organized with Tate Modern in London, the show also includes a recently produced documentary, Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots.

But the highest profile Kusama project is her just-launched fashion collaboration with Jacobs. Her dots are on shirts, skirts, shoes, sunglasses, and handbags, as well as all over the windows of the 453 Louis Vuitton stores worldwide. The company also teamed with the artist in a kicky video featuring the new collection. In it, even the models are speckled.