Miyoko Ito

American painter Miyoko Ito was born in 1918 in Berkeley, California. Being born to Japanese parents, she resided in Japan for five years starting in 1923 but returned to California afterwards, growing up in the East Bay and later attending the University of California, Berkeley. Her studies at the institution were interrupted by her internment in 1942 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She later studied as a graduate student at Smith College and later transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, never graduating from them but basing herself in the city from then onwards.

Ito’s practice matured in the 1970s, as signaled by her receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973 or her solo show with iconic Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind. Ito’s works often consist of abstract compositions that allude to biomorphic objects, washed over by a gradation of rich and muted colors. Influenced by Surrealism, Synthetic Cubism, Heian Japanese painting, and other styles, Ito creates enchanting artworks with dreamlike and poetic sensations. Her works navigate themes such as time, introspection, myth, ritual, and communication, opening themselves to multiple avenues of interpretation, whether that be through her personal experience, interpretation of the picture plane as a landscape, or appreciating them as a pure celebration of color.

Ito was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 and has exhibited extensively throughout the 1970s and 1980s, mainly at galleries based in New York and Chicago, along with museum retrospectives such as Miyoko Ito: A Review at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. With recent renewed interest, Miyoko Ito has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, such as her solo exhibitions Heart of Hearts at Artists Space, New York and MATRIX 267 at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Ito’s works are held in renowned institutional collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and more.