In 2017, ShiPu Wang, the Coats Endowed Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at the University of California, Merced, authored a superb book, The Other American Moderns, in which he devoted critical attention to four American moderns artists of Japanese ancestry: Frank Matsura (1873-1913), Eitaro Ishigaki (1893-1958), Hideo Noda (1908-1939), and Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953). Wang’s overarching point in spotlighting the work of these Japan-born painters of U.S. repute (the first three men, the fourth a woman) was to enlarge and diversify the meaning of American modernism by arguing that their perspective as “others” allowed them to infuse the genre with a previously lacking multicultural and cosmopolitan dimension.

By contrast, in the present work, Wang has edited a published catalogue (i.e., a book), Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Mine Okubo,  published by the University of California Press, to accompany a groundbreaking exhibition of the same name assembled by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Its dual purpose is, first, to showcase nearly 100 works of art produced by three acclaimed women artists of Japanese ancestry—Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi (1907-1991), and Miné Okubo (1912-2001)—during the 1920s to 1990s, and, second, to scrutinize and illuminate the previously untold multifaceted relationships that this remarkable trio of painters shared with one another.

The format of the catalogue consists of a cogent introduction by Ann Burroughs, the innovative president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum; a succinct and insightful introduction to the project’s content, foci and overarching purpose by Wang; and three in-depth sections (replete with luminous essays by a cadre of authoritative art critics) devoted to the 1920s–1990s painting careers of Hayakawa, Hibi, and Okubo.

The first of these, “Faces & Communities,” is centered on their pre-World War II portraiture and figurative works; the second, “Belongings & [dis] Locations,” is riveted on their prewar and wartime landscapes and still lives; and the third, “Explorations & Rediscoveries,” is devoted to their postwar abstractions. In addition, the catalogue is brought to a close with a selection of statements by two of the three featured artists, Hisako Hibi and Okubo.

In her essay entitled “New Acquisitions: Notes from an Expanding Field,” Melissa Ho, curator of twentieth century art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, places the Pictures of Belonging exhibition and catalogue into an appropriate context when she writes that “together they bring into the larger light of American art history three artists whose contributions have been overlooked in scholarly and public conceptions of U.S. art and culture.”

Between 2024 and 2026, the exhibition will travel across the country and be on display in five different venues: the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California, and JANM in Los Angeles.

Regrettably, the exhibition will not be shown in San Francisco, the cosmopolitan art community that played such an important role in nurturing the early work of Hayakawa, Hibi and Okubo. Fortuitously, the bountiful catalogue here under review will reach a multitude of other art lovers unable to be in attendance at any of the assorted exhibition sites.

Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Mine Okubo
Edited by ShiPu Wang
(Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum/University of California Press, 2023, 188 pp., $50, hardcover)

* This article was originally published in Nichi Bei News on July 18, 2024.

© 2024 Art Hansen, Nichi Bei News