I was honored to be a guest speaker for the Art Museum of WVU’s Lunchtime Looks this month, where I discussed the work of artist Miyoko Ito (1918–1983), focusing on her Pyramid of Silence, currently on view. Since I’m a bit more comfortable writing than speaking, I thought I’d share my thoughts on my blog as well… enjoy!
When I first encountered Miyoko Ito’s Pyramid of Silence (1964) (right) in the Art Museum of West Virginia University’s current exhibition, Evolving Visions: A Century of Women Artists Working in Abstraction, I admired its beauty but didn’t feel immediately struck by it. My attention is often pulled toward overtly feminist works—the declarative boldness of May Stevens, the textual layering of Leslie Dill, or Judy Chicago’s reclamation of bodily space. Ito’s abstractions, by contrast, seemed quieter. But after hearing the Curator about her tension being a mother-artist and having less than adequate working space that she had stated outright, I began to see that quietness as radical in its own right.
Ito was born in Berkeley in 1918 and spent part of her childhood in Japan, where she studied traditional art and was often bed-bound due to illness, before returning to California. That early immersion in another cultural aesthetic—subtlety, with the constraint of spatial awareness—stayed with her. Later, as a young woman at UC Berkeley, she studied watercolor until World War II changed the course of her life. She and her husband were incarcerated at Tanforan and Topaz. Even there, she continued to teach art to fellow Japanese Americans, affirming her belief that creativity was essential to survival.
After the war, Ito enrolled at Smith College, where she was the only graduate in art, and then transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago would remain her home for the rest of her life. At SAIC, she immersed herself in the modernist canon—studying Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism—while refusing to be limited by it. The Art Institute offered a relatively supportive environment, with women professors on faculty, making it a friendlier place for a woman artist to find her footing.
Though sometimes grouped with the Chicago Imagists, Ito forged her own path, while mothering to two children (born 1949 and 50). Her paintings are filled with tension—between solidity and dissolution, intimacy and distance. That unease with space may stem from her years moving between cultures, the confinement of internment, and the shifting demands of motherhood, often painting in a spare bedroom at the whim of her children. Often working in domestic interiors, Ito transformed space frequently dismissed as marginal into a site of serious abstraction.
Her titles, too, point to psychological currents beneath the work. They are often pedestrian, almost casual—Pyramid of Silence—yet hint at something more elusive: states of mind, fragments of thought, traces of the everyday made uncanny. Color became one of her most expressive tools. In the 1950s and early 60s, her palette leaned toward cool, brackish midcentury hues—muted greens, stormy grays, seawater blues. Over time, her paintings warmed: luminous oranges, glowing reds, and honeyed tones softened her geometric scaffolds, making her abstractions feel more internal, more alive.
Pyramid of Silence sits at a crossroads of these qualities. Its glowing compartments balance stability and fragility, evoking thresholds, corners, and psychic interiors. For Ito, abstraction became a way to translate inner life into luminous form, without needing to name it directly. The comparison with feminist artist Judy Chicago (American b. 1939) is telling: Chicago reclaimed bodily space, inserting women’s presence into art history through scale, symbolism, and visibility. Ito, by contrast, reclaimed psychic and lived space. Her persistence in painting—often from within domestic interiors—was itself feminist. (Chicago was also born in the city and attended the Art Institute of Chicago as a child; and went to California for school. She also wrote in her first autobiography about how many women artists were discriminated against in the 1970s for making art in domestic spaces.)
Ito’s career included the 1975 Whitney Biennial and a solo at the Renaissance Society in 1980, but recognition came late. Today, her work reads as “interior self-portraits”—testaments to resilience, memory, and the refusal to stop creating (she was also a breast cancer survivor). Many younger artists are now reclaiming domestic space, psychic space, and personal narrative in ways that echo Ito. Cathy Lu creates abstract, meditative works that reflect personal and familial histories, layering color and form in subtle, intimate ways. Ito can thus be seen as a precursor to this generation, demonstrating how abstraction can hold both personal and collective memory, private grief, and psychic resilience.
Ito’s quiet radicalism offers an alternative feminist model that resonates today, when discussions of resistance, care work, and invisible labor are at the forefront. Her work reminds us that not all activism is loud—some is slow, interior, or persistent. In a culture grappling with burnout and the undervaluation of domestic and emotional labor, Ito’s abstractions underscore the power of creative persistence, private reflection, and the assertion that one’s inner life matters.
Her abstractions remind us that feminist art is not always declarative or monumental. Sometimes it is steady, meditative, and deeply private. Ito’s quiet radicalism was to insist that inner life mattered—that color, form, and space could hold the weight of survival, motherhood, displacement, and endurance.
I’m really glad I got the opportunity to look back on Ito’s work with fresh eyes. Her personal statement about wanting more space to work in as a mother, continues to resonate.