More than 30 years after her death, Miyoko Ito presents her self-proclaimed first show at the spacious Matthew Marks Gallery (February 24-April 15, 2023). The fact that the exhibition takes place in a premier facility in the art world signals the fusion of artistic achievement and financial viability, and draws long-deserved attention to a body of work that has been under-recognized in New York and should be better known in Chicago. , where the artist lived. As much as the gallery has done to make Ito’s work widely visible, I think it should have done more, starting with the catalog (with a timeline) accompanying the exhibition, as no essay provides context for his work.
From March 17 to April 30, 2006, the small Adam Baumgold Gallery on the Upper East Side hosted an exhibition of Ito’s work. In my review I wrote:
While the paintings of Miyoko Ito (1918-1983) were included in most investigative exhibitions and books on Chicago art from 1945 to 1995, she still remains under-known in Chicago, and almost invisible in New York. The last time she had a solo exhibition here was in 1978. The reasons for Ito’s lack of recognition are complex, but they would include the fact that she […] was neither pure abstraction nor flat work, which meant that it went against the grain.
That Ito hit her stride when she was in her early thirties meant, as she noted in the catalog, “to be called an old lady painter, outdated at thirty or thirty-one, is very difficult to accept”.
The New York art world’s insistence on objectivity (or an anti-subjective stance) made it almost impossible for its critics and leading gallerists to recognize some of the biographical sources of Ito’s resistance to flatness, to monochrome, pure opticality and grid – pillars of Minimalism.
The press release also does not suggest how cultural difference may have played a role in Ito’s aesthetic formation. While the current show’s press release states that “In 1942, a month before she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, she and her husband were sent to Tanforan, an internment camp in south of San Francisco under an executive order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt”, he never describes his experience there. Instead, he goes on to say, “The following year Ito was allowed to leave the camp to attend a graduate program at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute in 1944, where she lived until her death in 1983.
The press release suggests Ito has established herself in white cultural spaces, but a closer look at her timeline indicates that is not the case. One statement, quoted in the “chronology” section of the catalog, seems key. When she was five, her mother took her and her sister back to Japan so they could receive a traditional education, including art and calligraphy lessons. During this time she suffered from what she described as a ‘childhood nervous breakdown’, explaining: ‘It was very painful and pleasant at the same time. Those five years are the roots of who I am right now. Another fact that is ignored in the press release is his relationship with other Japanese artists working in the United States. While Ito and her husband were in the internment camp, she taught “art classes to her fellow Tanforan inmates as part of a program initiated at the camp by artist and Berkeley teacher Chiura Obata” .
With the approval of the camp administration, Obata, a contemporary master of woodblock printing and sumi ink painting, opened an art school less than a month after he and his family were sent to Tanforan. He assembled a group of 16 instructors, including Miné Okubo (1912-2001), who had studied with Fernand Léger in Paris and assisted Diego Rivera on his Treasure Island mural in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The professional accomplishments of the instructors suggest that the first global support art community in which Ito flourished was entirely Japanese and existed completely separately from the rest of the segregated United States.
Ito’s transition from watercolor and lithography to oil painting was not easy. In 1950 she said in an interview with Dennis Barrie, “When I say it took me five years to really digest the process of oil painting, nobody believes me. But it’s true.”
Ito’s artistic practice has been influenced by her life in Japan, her roots in ink and watercolor painting, and her association with a group of accomplished Japanese artists as a young adult; these forces helped her pursue a different trajectory in which assimilation was impossible. While the Chicago art world embraced her (as evidenced by her friendship with artist and curator Don Baum, who gave her a solo exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, and artists such as Ray Yoshida, Roger Brown, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson), New York – where she had worked at the Whitney Biennial in 1975 – never shone it. In 2018, Miyoko Ito: Heart of Heartsoriginally from the Berkeley Art Museum, came to Art Space without much fanfare, in part because the wider New York art world had yet to acknowledge the existence of Asian American artists, except Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama and Ruth Asawa.
The exhibition presents 16 oil paintings made between 1948 and 1983 and three lithographs from 1949-1950. They trace Ito’s evolution from a painter working with flat shapes that fit together, as in the Cubist-influenced “Easel and Table” (1948), to a painting made the year of his death. , “First Veronda” (1983), which I believe is still in the collection of Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, and is the only painting from that decade in the show.
The strongest paintings in the exhibition are the 10 dated between 1970 and 1977, when she was finally able to paint full time after spending years as a single mother at home who survived breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. As the exhibition shows, it was in the 1970s that Ito went beyond creating a body of work that was unlike anyone else and conjured up abstract views full of nostalgia and of mystery. She achieved this through her attention to composition, spatial relationships, color gradients, subtle tonal shifts, and a palette of vermillions, browns, turquoise blues and greens, and yellows that have their roots in Asian art and furniture and are not seen as much. in Euro-American art. Ito fused his inspirations – Cubism, Paul Klee and surrealism filtered through Chicago imagists – to his awareness of luminosity and tonality, stemming from the study of watercolor and ink painting, and his personal experience.
In “Heart of Hearts, Basking” (1973), a rectangle is placed in a recessed space just below the top edge of the painting, framed by adjoining bands with rounded tops. Vertical painting is split horizontally. Curved flat shapes dominate the lower half, while the upper half is a spatially complex arrangement of small shapes and inclined planes. The gradient color adds another twist to the viewing experience. It is hard to imagine that this point of view is based on something experienced or remembered. Is the indented rectangle any portal? What is the multicolored vertical linear shape floating in the middle? Around the edges of the painting are tacks that have not been driven all the way to the stretcher, firmly securing the canvas to its support. It’s like Ito hasn’t decided if the paint should be reworked. This state, both finished and unfinished, haunts the exhibition.
For “Sea Chest” (1973), the title could allude to the fact that Ito and his family sailed from San Francisco to Japan and back in the 1920s. Is the arched shape at top left a window overlooking a calm turquoise blue sea or a mirror? It seems to rest on a chest divided into six rectangles. What can be read in the lines descending from a circle? Is this a nod to Ito’s mastery of kanji, Japanese writing using Chinese ideograms? In compositions that include a rectangle or an arcuate plane, we glimpse something that we cannot understand. A sense of longing and mystery, isolation and loneliness fills the picture. The fact that Ito does not yet have a full monograph is inexcusable.
Miyoko Itō continues at the Matthew Marks Gallery (522 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through April 15. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
