Catalogue Notes
More than four decades after her death, Miyoko Ito’s work is quietly, yet steadily, beginning to command the critical attention it has longed deserved. Refusing the machismo of Abstract Expressionism and sidestepping the mass-produced cool of Pop Art, the American-born Japanese artist forged a singular visual vocabulary of introspective, psychologically charged painting. As dominant postwar movements took hold, her work—difficult to categorize and geographically removed from the art-world centers of New York and Los Angeles—faded from broader view.
Based in Chicago for most of her career, Ito showed occasionally with the Chicago Imagists. Still, her quiet, enigmatic compositions shared little with their irreverent figuration, both in tone and temperament. “To be called an old-lady painter, passé, at age thirty, thirty-one, is very hard to take,” she admitted in a 1978 interview. “At the same time, I had no choice.”
That resolve is now paying off. A pair of exhibitions—in 2017 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and in 2018 at Artists Space in New York—helped reintroduce her to a new generation. Major institutions have followed suit: the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have all made significant acquisitions, signaling a long-overdue reconsideration of her place in the postwar canon.
Unraveling slowly before the viewer’s eyes, Ito’s paintings resist immediate resolution, revealing themselves not in fragments, but through the accumulation of form, tone, and mood. Her shapes twist and fold inward, turned toward some intimate inner logic, while her colors hover in the space between memory and sensation — elusive, felt more than seen. At first glance, her compositions might resemble architecture or landscapes: windows, portals, tabletops, vessels, terrains. But they never settle into depiction. Instead, they reverberate with a kind of inward pressure, as if containing remnants of a psychic or emotional force on the verge of surfacing.
Ito’s vision took shape early, rooted in a bicultural upbringing that sharpened her sensitivity to line, rhythm, and form. Born in Berkeley in 1918, she spent her early childhood in Japan, where a rigorous education in calligraphy and painting shaped her approach to mark-making. That foundation—both disciplined and intuitive—never left her. Even as she moved toward oil-painted abstractions, her compositions carried traces of those early lessons: a commitment to structure, a reverence for gesture, a focus on the internal logic of the image.
But her path was far from uninterrupted. In 1942, following the outbreak of World War II, Ito and her husband were among the thousands of Japanese Americans forced into internment. They spent several months at Tanforan, a former racetrack converted into a detention center just south of San Francisco. While she rarely spoke about the experience and never directly addressed it in her work, its presence lingers. Her paintings often feel enclosed—sealed environments under quiet pressure, filled with a tension that never quite resolves. “Every time I have a problem, I go deeper and deeper into painting,” she once said. “I have no place to take myself except painting.” For Ito, the canvas became both sanctuary and crucible—a space where memory and imagination fused into something ineffable, but deeply felt.
By the mid-1960s, she had arrived at a mature language uniquely her own. Her paintings from this period pulse with a quiet intensity—neither static nor kinetic, but suspended, vibrating with latent emotion. “She is really becoming a master of color fades,” curator Jordan Stein observed, “which are warm, beautiful, and anything but static.” The interplay between structure and softness, edge and haze, lends the work its haunting interiority. These are not diagrams of the external world, but landscapes of the psyche—what critic Chris Murtha described as “vistas, like desert mirages… products of the mind as much as of the world. No place and every place: Her paintings bring us there.”
Today, as Ito’s paintings continue to surface in new contexts, their quiet force endures. They ask us to look slowly, to linger, to attune ourselves to nuance and sensation. In doing so, they offer not just a reconsideration of her place in history, but an invitation to see inward.
