Miyoko Ito was an abstract painter who layered geometric and organic forms in an idiosyncratic palette of gradients, creating compositions as dense as they are rich. Born in Berkeley, California, to Japanese parents, in 1942 she was forcibly sent to Tanforan, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans south of San Francisco. There, Ito taught art classes and was supported by fellow incarcerated artists. In 1944, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; she continued to live and work in the city until her passing in 1983. Her paintings are singular—a byproduct of influences including peer Chicago Imagists, Cubism, and the art of Paul Klee, but most significantly, her lived experience as a Japanese American woman in the twentieth century.

–Yuri Stone, from the Glenstone Field Guide