[2] Tomii helped organize the first North American retrospective on the work of Yayoi Kusama (1989), and collaborated closely[1][2][3] with curator Alexandra Munroe to produce the seminal[4][5][6] exhibition and book Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994).
[2][1] Munroe has extensively praised Tomii's work on the exhibition, writing, "The biographical and bibliographic research compiled and translated by Reiko Tomii have created the foundation for all subsequent research on Kusama..."[10] The two curators continued their collaboration by developing the seminal 1994 exhibition Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945 at the Guggenheim SoHo in New York.
Tomii is especially known for her work on Japanese artists and art collectives in the 1960s and 1970s such as Genpei Akasegawa, Hi-Red Center, Kazuo Shiraga, Gutai, and Mono-ha.
[7] The prize selection committee praised the book as "impeccably researched and clearly written...offering a wealth of new insight and analysis on modernist art history of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s...thereby expanding and challenging the understanding of global modernisms.
In 2013, Tomii appeared in the documentary film Cutie and the Boxer, about Japanese avant-garde artist Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko.