#miyoko ito

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Miyoko Ito (American, 1918-1983), The Garden, 1957. Oil and canvas collage on canvas, 50 ½ x 35 ¼ in.

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[cupofmeat]

"Yellow Sea", Miyoko Ito, 1959. Oil on canvas.

[chainsawpunk]

Miyoko Ito, Sea Chest, 1972, oil on canvas, 47 x 45 in (119.4 x 114.3 cm)

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Miyoko Ito

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Miyoko Ito

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Miyoko Ito (1918–1983) oil on canvas from 1957, coming up for sale in the @sothebys, New York ‘Contemporary Day Auction’ on 14th May, estimate $100-150k

Miyoko Ito (April 27, 1918–August 18, 1983) was an American artist known for her watercolor and abstract oil paintings and prints. Via Wikipedia

[hyperallergic]

Miyoko Ito melded her inspirations — Cubism, Paul Klee, and surrealism filtered through the Chicago Imagists — to her awareness of luminosity and tonality, which came from studying watercolor and ink painting, and to her personal experience.  In her art, we glimpse something we cannot comprehend — a sense of longing and mystery, isolation and solitude fill the paintings.

More than 30 years after her death, Ito is having her self-named debut show at the spacious Matthew Marks Gallery.

[naberiie]

Miyoko Ito, Untitled 1970. Oil on canvas.

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Miyoko Ito, Heart of Hearts, Basking, 1973

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Miyoko Ito (1918-1983)

[harvardfineartslib]

“I have no place to take myself except painting.” – Miyoko Ito, 1978.

Miyoko Ito (1918–1983) was a Japanese American painter, born in Berkeley, California, and was active in Chicago where she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.

When the World War II began in 1941 in the United States with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ito was studying art at University of California, Berkeley. She was a senior scheduled to graduate in May 1942. In April 1942, Ito married Harry Ichiyasu to avoid being separated during the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Her husband was president of the senior class of the Japanese constituency at UC Berkeley. They were married on April 11th, but by the end of April they were sent to Tanforan internment camp near San Francisco, and later sent to Topaz under an Executive Order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ito received her diploma while she was in the internment camp, then received a grant to attend a graduate program at Smith College. She stayed there for one year before going on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ito said she cried when she opened her diploma. She graduated with highest honors.

Miyoko Ito was hardly unknown during her lifetime, though she gained some attention and was granted residency fellowships at MacDowell in New Hampshire. It was there that she experienced “the meaning of full expression in the conductive environment,” she wrote in her “Plan of Work” in 1983. She continued, “I would like to escape the heretofore stifling condition of low ceiling, dim daylight, and inadequate floor space” of her bedroom studio in her house.

This publication, “Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts” is the first book dedicated to the life and work of Miyoko Ito, long overdue for this artist.

Image 1: Front cover featuring “Island in the Sun”, 1978, Oil on canvas, 38”x 33”

Image 2: Portrait of Miyoko Ito by Mary Baber, 1975

Image 3: “Aura”, 1966, Oil on canvas, 50”x 45”

Miyoko Ito : heart of hearts Pre-Echo, 2023. 452 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), portraits ; 30 cm English HOLLIS number: 99157645381703941

[cupofmeat]

"Island in the Sun", Miyoko Ito, 1978. Oil on canvas.

[chainsawpunk]

Miyoko Ito, Untitled #126, 1975, oil on canvas, 47 x 43 inches

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Miyoko Ito (1918–1983)

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Miyoko Ito 1918–1983

Allusive abstractionist Miyoko Ito was born into a Japanese family in Berkeley, California in 1918. She moved to Japan with her parents in 1923 to avoid discrimination and for initial art training, including calligraphy lessons. Ito later returned to Berkeley and majored in art at the University of California, where she was exposed to Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque plus Hans Hofmann's geometric compositions. During World War II, Ito was interned with her family at the Topaz camp in Delta, Utah, but she was awarded her diploma from UC Berkeley in 1942. After graduate study at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Ito earned a scholarship for postgraduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the late 1940s, Ito began to paint abstract oils in a Cubist style softened with Impressionistic brushwork. Critical acclaim came in the 1950s as Ito's paintings were part of the Art Institute's Chicago and Vicinity shows as well as the 61st American Exhibition in 1954. During this period, Ito befriended local artists Ray Yoshida and Evelyn Statsinger, whose passion for Surrealism led Ito to move away from representational painting. Rather than render landscapes, figures, or objects explicitly, Ito suggested them with shapes, lines, and curves. Simultaneously, Ito's preferred palette went from pastels to vivid oranges and reds, which she banded subtly to compel attention.

Although free of Pop references, the work that Ito made in the 1960s has been linked tangentially to Chicago Imagism, and Ito knew Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, and Roger Brown. Blues, greens, and purples returned to Ito's painting in the 1970s before she grew more formally abstract as the 1980s began. With the artists Richard Loving, William Conger, and Frank Piatek, Ito devised the term 'allusive abstractionism' for their shared approach.