Miyoko Ito Heart of Hearts April 7

4 5 6 7 Miyoko Ito

1 2 8 Heart of Hearts 14 3 13

12 11 10 9 April 7 – May 6, 2018

1 2 8 Heart of Hearts 14 3 13

12 11 10 9 April 7 – May 6, 2018

1 Heart of Hearts, Basking, 1973 9 Odyssey, 1981 We would like to extend our “I have no place to take myself except painting.” Oil on canvas Oil on canvas gratitude to all of the lenders to –Miyoko Ito, 19781 44 × 31 inches 29 ¼ × 37 ½ inches Heart of Hearts: Matthew Marks Gallery Gordon VeneKlasen Collection Alice Brunner, Peter Doig and Parinaz Mogadassi, Karen Lennox, 2 Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfeld 10 Tabled Presence, 1971 Kate Lennox, Matthew Marks Heart of Hearts comprises a selection of enigmatic abstract paintings by Miyoko Ito Miyoko Ito: An Interview, 1978 Oil on canvas Gallery, JPMorgan Chase Art (1918–1983), whose work has remained largely unexamined and overlooked outside ½-inch tape transferred to digital 48 × 56 inches Collection, John B. Pittman, Robert video (b/w, sound) Alice Brunner, Chicago Storr, Karin Tappendorf, and of the city of Chicago, where she lived and worked. The exhibition spans over two 54 min 57 sec Gordon VeneKlasen. Thanks also to decades of Ito’s practice and, continuing the longtime mission of Artists Space to Courtesy of the Video Data Bank, 11 Mandarin, or the Red Empress, 1977 Video Data Bank, School of the create timely reappraisals of often marginalized voices and approaches in the feld School of the Art Institute of Oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago; and the Chicago 46 × 41 inches University of California, Berkeley Art of visual culture, marks the frst solo institutional presentation of Ito’s work in New Richard and Clement Durkes Museum and Pacifc Film Archive York. 3 Kalamazoo, 1959 Collection Oil on canvas With generous support contributed 56 × 70 inches 12 Island in the Sun, 1978 by Frank Williams and Matthew Miyoko Ito was born in Berkeley, California, to Japanese parents in 1918. As a young Karin Tappendorf Collection Oil on canvas Marks Gallery girl, she spent several years with her mother and sister in Japan, where she frst 38 × 33 inches experimented with calligraphy and painting. Ito followed her father in attending 4 Center Stage, 1980 John B. Pittman Collection Heart of Hearts Supporters: Oil on canvas The Friends of Artists Space, University of California, Berkeley, where she studied watercolor under John Haley, 29 ½ x 37 ½ inches 13 Todoroki, 1974 The Artists Space Program Fund, Erle Loran, and Worth Ryder. Months before her graduation in 1942, Ito was sent Robert Storr Oil on canvas Lambent Foundation Fund of to Tanforan, an internment camp south of San Francisco. Released years before Tides Foundation, New York City 47 × 39 inches her new husband, she briefy matriculated at Smith College before transferring to 5 Gorodiva, 1968 Alice Brunner, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in Oil on canvas partnership with the City Council, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a scholarship but 48 x 48 inches 14 Walls of No Escape, 1980 New York State Council on the Arts never graduated. Although her efforts were highly susceptible to regionalization, Karen Lennox Gallery Oil on canvas with the support of Governor Ito participated in the 1975 Whitney Biennial and was honored with a retrospective 48 × 34 inches Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York 6 Untitled, 1971–72 John B. Pittman Collection State Legislature exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 1980. She was represented by Phyllis Oil on canvas Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York from the late 1960s through her death in 46 × 46 inches 1983. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at the University of California, Karen Lennox Gallery Berkeley Art Museum and Pacifc Film Archive, 2017; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New 7 Bell Cage, 1973 York, 2006 and 2014; VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin, 2012; and No Vacancies, a group Oil on canvas Thank you to Matthew Coleman, presentation at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, 2015. 46 ¼ × 37 ½ inches Apsara DiQuinzio, Lela Hersh, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection Beth Petriello, and Lindsey White Curated by Jordan Stein in collaboration with Artists Space, Heart of Hearts follows 8 Iliad, 1981 Miyoko Ito / MATRIX 267 at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Oil on canvas Pacifc Film Archive. 30 × 38 inches Peter Doig and Parinaz Mogadossi This exhibition builds on MATRIX 267 at the practice informed by the patterns and textures of Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, and False Image, Later works like Center Stage, 1980, and Iliad, 1981, University of California, Berkley Art Museum Synthetic Cubism that had defned her education. who were fresh out of undergraduate studies grow increasingly abstract and celestial, the drama and Pacifc Film Archive, Ito’s frst monographic Experimenting in other painting and printmaking at SAIC and a countercultural force willfully at their core not just hollow, but indeterminate. institutional presentation in nearly forty years. methods, including lithography, etching, and oil disengaged from broader art world trends. A more profound sense of space is signaled, as if Like its West Coast counterpart, Heart of Hearts paint on canvas, she began to alter her formal Ito’s work was more diffcult to socially and the theater itself, unsure of its role without actors, is not a decisive survey, but instead brings approach. Sharp corners grew rounded and aesthetically categorize, and she was an outsider begins to come undone. Ever warmer, and deftly together a group of works, mostly taken from the compositions turned bodily and tubular. Her style, in age, disposition, background, and concerns. articulate of painting’s ability to hold opposites in 1970s until the end of Ito’s life, which highlight defned by some as “abstract impressionism,”4 Her union of physical and metaphysical worlds singular forms, they are rendered in mauve, pine, her exploration of self-portraiture and place. was informed by the surfaces of Pierre Bonnard would have been too precious for many of the summer orange, and countless shades of blue. and the creeping infuence of Surrealism.5 urbane up-and-comers. Titles like Oracle, Shrine, At once frst person and topographic in their Dusk, Narcissa, and Steps signal an interest in Numerous canvases are affxed to their stretcher construction, many works from this period overlay Beginning in the late 1940s, Ito’s work was time, ritual, repetition, and myth. Ito’s efforts are bars with half-driven tacks, apparently the result a mountainous, bust-like fgure against a distant included in large—and largely anonymous—annual more aligned with the materially rich and visionary of Ito’s wish to remove and continue working horizon of saturated color. Though references to juried exhibitions around the country, including work of painters such as Forrest Bess and Helen on various paintings over time. The raised tacks landscape painting and architecture are overt, repeat appearances at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frankenthaler, her contemporaries, or Arthur remain, however, even in many “fnished” works— Ito’s highly structured, never-quite-symmetrical the San Francisco Museum of Art (later the San Dove and Giorgio Morandi, a generation older. as if a halo beyond the canvas edge. As critic compositions suggest a mapping of the psyche, Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and the John Yau notes, they “recall the need to be able oscillating between confnement and expanse. In Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. From the early The earliest and largest work in the exhibition, to leave quickly with what is most precious, to be a palette that warms over time, vertical stacks of 1970s, these message-in-a-bottle submissions Kalamazoo, 1959, depicts a menagerie of wide- able to roll it up rather than leave it behind.”8 They tubes, bars, and mounds are rendered in delicate gave way to more nuanced participation at eyed fgures in a thick, earthy application of mid- speak to a violent and vulnerable admission of fades of color and subtle modulations in tone. a number of nimble and exciting Chicago century browns, blues, and yellows. Its title, which the mere thingness of painting, and in turn, life. A picture emerges of an artist endeavoring to institutions, including a 1971 solo exhibition at references a town just over the Michigan border position herself in relation to hazy and remote the Hyde Park Art Center and the 1972 landmark from Illinois, may have sounded otherworldly to a – Jordan Stein surroundings. “I have no place to take myself exhibition Chicago Imagist Art at the Museum of Midwestern transplant seeking inspiration. A sense except painting,” Ito revealed in a 1978 interview.2 Contemporary Art. The artist was an early charge of buoyancy and depth foreshadows the foating of Phyllis Kind, whose gallery would go on to network of wiggles, threads, dots, portals, and 1. Miyoko Ito: An Interview, Blumenthal/Horsfeld, Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, represent now internationally recognized Imagist tufts that would populate her efforts for decades. Video Data Bank, 1978. but relocated to Japan as a young girl with her artists Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, 2. Ibid. 3. Oral history interview with Miyoko Ito, July 20, pregnant mother and younger sister, owing to and Barbara Rossi, among others. Nutt recalls The compartmentalized spaces of her most fertile 1978. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian her family’s limited means and a diffcult housing that Kind’s embrace of Ito motivated him and period are organic and exact, like dreams recalled Institution. Online. Tabled Presence 4. Miyoko Ito: An Interview. market. “Those fve years are the roots of what I wife Nilsson to join her growing artist roster, one in unusual detail. Works like , 5. Ibid. am right now,” she reported later, explaining that that became critical to Chicago’s art history.6 1971, and Heart of Hearts, 1973, portray furniture- 6. Jim Nutt, conversation with the author, September like elements slipping into abstraction, while 19, 2016. they were both “very wonderful” and “terribly 7. Miyoko Ito: An Interview. traumatic.”3 While she excelled in an arts-flled Though a generation older than the stars of a simultaneously suggesting a mind becoming a 8. John Yau, “Artseen: Miyoko Ito,” Brooklyn Rail, curriculum at school, her mother gave birth to movement known for its offbeat, comic book closet or drawer—that is, an apparatus for the May 9, 2006. Online. a stillborn child and Ito became badly ill, for iconography, Ito shared the Imagists’ zeal for arrangement of things, sometimes shared but Jordan Stein is a curator based in a time losing the ability to walk. Towards the the subliminal juxtaposition, logic-defying often closed or concealed. Not explicitly political, San Francisco, California. end of her life, the artist experienced a nervous representation, and technical precision of the tension between domestic and subjective breakdown, and would speak about this earlier Surrealism. Ito and the younger artists successfully interiority, the act of self-portraiture, and her chapter of her childhood in these terms. fused Pop Art’s feverish palette with an eccentric, collage-like practice are nonetheless in tune with outsider air. A sense of discovery was prized. the second-wave feminism of the time. Returning to Berkeley, Ito attended high school “When I approach a canvas, I try to as much as and majored in art practice at UC Berkeley. Her possible keep my mind blank,” Ito remarked.7 The title of Todoroki, 1974, is a Japanese surname senior year was interrupted by World War II, when Improvisatory drawings in red, green, and charcoal common to the Nagano Prefecture, where it she was sent to Tanforan—a San Bruno horse formed the foundations of emergent paintings, exists as a location. It is also a remote waterfall track turned internment camp—alongside her new the lines serving as shadowy gaps between color in the Okinawa Prefecture, and, neatly, in English husband and thousands of others under Executive forms. translates to “rumble” or “resound.” The painting Order 9066, signed by Franklin Roosevelt in emphasizes an overlapping of name, place, 1942. Once liberated, Ito briefy pursued graduate Ito, however, cannot wholly or adequately be and sound, and is indicative of Ito’s unfxed studies at Smith College before transferring to described as an Imagist. The group associated and occasionally synesthetic approach. Thick, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). with Chicago Imagism was largely assembled horizontal lines support the picture as stretcher Later that decade, she abandoned the watercolor from a network of self-organized cliques like the bars support a frame. This exhibition builds on MATRIX 267 at the practice informed by the patterns and textures of Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, and False Image, Later works like Center Stage, 1980, and Iliad, 1981, University of California, Berkley Art Museum Synthetic Cubism that had defned her education. who were fresh out of undergraduate studies grow increasingly abstract and celestial, the drama and Pacifc Film Archive, Ito’s frst monographic Experimenting in other painting and printmaking at SAIC and a countercultural force willfully at their core not just hollow, but indeterminate. institutional presentation in nearly forty years. methods, including lithography, etching, and oil disengaged from broader art world trends. A more profound sense of space is signaled, as if Like its West Coast counterpart, Heart of Hearts paint on canvas, she began to alter her formal Ito’s work was more diffcult to socially and the theater itself, unsure of its role without actors, is not a decisive survey, but instead brings approach. Sharp corners grew rounded and aesthetically categorize, and she was an outsider begins to come undone. Ever warmer, and deftly together a group of works, mostly taken from the compositions turned bodily and tubular. Her style, in age, disposition, background, and concerns. articulate of painting’s ability to hold opposites in 1970s until the end of Ito’s life, which highlight defned by some as “abstract impressionism,”4 Her union of physical and metaphysical worlds singular forms, they are rendered in mauve, pine, her exploration of self-portraiture and place. was informed by the surfaces of Pierre Bonnard would have been too precious for many of the summer orange, and countless shades of blue. and the creeping infuence of Surrealism.5 urbane up-and-comers. Titles like Oracle, Shrine, At once frst person and topographic in their Dusk, Narcissa, and Steps signal an interest in Numerous canvases are affxed to their stretcher construction, many works from this period overlay Beginning in the late 1940s, Ito’s work was time, ritual, repetition, and myth. Ito’s efforts are bars with half-driven tacks, apparently the result a mountainous, bust-like fgure against a distant included in large—and largely anonymous—annual more aligned with the materially rich and visionary of Ito’s wish to remove and continue working horizon of saturated color. Though references to juried exhibitions around the country, including work of painters such as Forrest Bess and Helen on various paintings over time. The raised tacks landscape painting and architecture are overt, repeat appearances at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frankenthaler, her contemporaries, or Arthur remain, however, even in many “fnished” works— Ito’s highly structured, never-quite-symmetrical the San Francisco Museum of Art (later the San Dove and Giorgio Morandi, a generation older. as if a halo beyond the canvas edge. As critic compositions suggest a mapping of the psyche, Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and the John Yau notes, they “recall the need to be able oscillating between confnement and expanse. In Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. From the early The earliest and largest work in the exhibition, to leave quickly with what is most precious, to be a palette that warms over time, vertical stacks of 1970s, these message-in-a-bottle submissions Kalamazoo, 1959, depicts a menagerie of wide- able to roll it up rather than leave it behind.”8 They tubes, bars, and mounds are rendered in delicate gave way to more nuanced participation at eyed fgures in a thick, earthy application of mid- speak to a violent and vulnerable admission of fades of color and subtle modulations in tone. a number of nimble and exciting Chicago century browns, blues, and yellows. Its title, which the mere thingness of painting, and in turn, life. A picture emerges of an artist endeavoring to institutions, including a 1971 solo exhibition at references a town just over the Michigan border position herself in relation to hazy and remote the Hyde Park Art Center and the 1972 landmark from Illinois, may have sounded otherworldly to a – Jordan Stein surroundings. “I have no place to take myself exhibition Chicago Imagist Art at the Museum of Midwestern transplant seeking inspiration. A sense except painting,” Ito revealed in a 1978 interview.2 Contemporary Art. The artist was an early charge of buoyancy and depth foreshadows the foating of Phyllis Kind, whose gallery would go on to network of wiggles, threads, dots, portals, and 1. Miyoko Ito: An Interview, Blumenthal/Horsfeld, Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, represent now internationally recognized Imagist tufts that would populate her efforts for decades. Video Data Bank, 1978. but relocated to Japan as a young girl with her artists Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, 2. Ibid. 3. Oral history interview with Miyoko Ito, July 20, pregnant mother and younger sister, owing to and Barbara Rossi, among others. Nutt recalls The compartmentalized spaces of her most fertile 1978. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian her family’s limited means and a diffcult housing that Kind’s embrace of Ito motivated him and period are organic and exact, like dreams recalled Institution. Online. Tabled Presence 4. Miyoko Ito: An Interview. market. “Those fve years are the roots of what I wife Nilsson to join her growing artist roster, one in unusual detail. Works like , 5. Ibid. am right now,” she reported later, explaining that that became critical to Chicago’s art history.6 1971, and Heart of Hearts, 1973, portray furniture- 6. Jim Nutt, conversation with the author, September like elements slipping into abstraction, while 19, 2016. they were both “very wonderful” and “terribly 7. Miyoko Ito: An Interview. traumatic.”3 While she excelled in an arts-flled Though a generation older than the stars of a simultaneously suggesting a mind becoming a 8. John Yau, “Artseen: Miyoko Ito,” Brooklyn Rail, curriculum at school, her mother gave birth to movement known for its offbeat, comic book closet or drawer—that is, an apparatus for the May 9, 2006. Online. a stillborn child and Ito became badly ill, for iconography, Ito shared the Imagists’ zeal for arrangement of things, sometimes shared but Jordan Stein is a curator based in a time losing the ability to walk. Towards the the subliminal juxtaposition, logic-defying often closed or concealed. Not explicitly political, San Francisco, California. end of her life, the artist experienced a nervous representation, and technical precision of the tension between domestic and subjective breakdown, and would speak about this earlier Surrealism. Ito and the younger artists successfully interiority, the act of self-portraiture, and her chapter of her childhood in these terms. fused Pop Art’s feverish palette with an eccentric, collage-like practice are nonetheless in tune with outsider air. A sense of discovery was prized. the second-wave feminism of the time. Returning to Berkeley, Ito attended high school “When I approach a canvas, I try to as much as and majored in art practice at UC Berkeley. Her possible keep my mind blank,” Ito remarked.7 The title of Todoroki, 1974, is a Japanese surname senior year was interrupted by World War II, when Improvisatory drawings in red, green, and charcoal common to the Nagano Prefecture, where it she was sent to Tanforan—a San Bruno horse formed the foundations of emergent paintings, exists as a location. It is also a remote waterfall track turned internment camp—alongside her new the lines serving as shadowy gaps between color in the Okinawa Prefecture, and, neatly, in English husband and thousands of others under Executive forms. translates to “rumble” or “resound.” The painting Order 9066, signed by Franklin Roosevelt in emphasizes an overlapping of name, place, 1942. Once liberated, Ito briefy pursued graduate Ito, however, cannot wholly or adequately be and sound, and is indicative of Ito’s unfxed studies at Smith College before transferring to described as an Imagist. The group associated and occasionally synesthetic approach. Thick, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). with Chicago Imagism was largely assembled horizontal lines support the picture as stretcher Later that decade, she abandoned the watercolor from a network of self-organized cliques like the bars support a frame.