Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts

The result of several years of research, Heart of Hearts is the first book dedicated to the life and work of JapaneseAmerican artist Miyoko Ito. Ito was born in Berkeley, California to parents of Japanese descent and educated at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where she studied watercolor. A month before her graduation, in 1942, Ito was sentto the Tanforan Assembly Center, an internment camp south of San Francisco. Released several years before herhusband, she transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but never graduated. Unlike the other “AllusiveAbstractionists” with whom Ito was loosely associated, her geometric compositions often evoke landscapes, interiorsand the human body. Irregular forms are rendered in layers of paint applied horizontally, creating an ombré effectreminiscent of a sun over the horizon. Working on one canvas at a time, her technical precision was reflected in her slowworking process, painting in her studio from sunrise to sunset, often seven days a week. “I have no place to take myselfexcept painting,” she confided in a 1978 interview, “it has been my biggest life-giving force.”While Ito’s paintings have recently been the subject of critically acclaimed exhibitions at Matthew Marks Gallery, ArtistsSpace and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, her elegant and mysterious abstractions were and arescarcely known beyond Chicago, where she spent much of her adult life and made a career. Assembled by Pre-EchoPress and Jordan Stein—curator of Ito’s first two solo institutional exhibitions in nearly 40 years—Heart of Heartsfeatures over 100 full-color plates, archival materials, a 1978 interview with the artist and a 5,000-word biographicalessay that contextualizes Ito’s practice and aims to afford the artist her proper place within a history of postwarAmerican art.
ISBN 9798889929499. Pre-Echo Press. pb. .
reprinting