Wright Auction

Produced in 1973, Miyoko Ito's oil on canvas, Kachina, alludes through its title to her 1969 work, Katchina, which is included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Over the course of her career, Ito often created paintings that spoke to one another or comprised informal series through their titles and visual metaphors.

Whether transliterated kachina, katchina, or even katcina, this term denotes an ancestral spirit for Hopi and other Pueblo Indians who are believed to watch over tribes and visit them for ceremonies, agricultural and otherwise. The term also refers to masks worn by men for certain rituals and wooden dolls that young girls play with, in both cases to bridge the natural and spiritual realms.

“Miyoko Ito used long, tubular bands of color and layers upon layers of paint to build strikingly beautiful abstractions and was at the height of her powers while working in Chicago in the 1970s. She often left the nails around the stretcher partially tacked, creating an almost sculptural experience and a truly unique, signature style.” — Joe Stanfield, Director of Fine Art, Rago/Wright

In the 1969 and 1973 works, Ito renders similar geometric figures that could be interpreted as abstracted kachina dolls or masks. Both bear vertical and diagonal bands of color along with rounded corners on top. Yet, in the earlier work, the perspective is foreshortened into something resembling a close-up and the palette incorporates earth tones and rich pastels. By contrast, the 1973 work offers a pulled-back view, in which the kachina figure seems set against a desert landscape, and the palette is at once warmer and more subdued. Of course, the latter painting is even more distinctive given what lies along the edges of the canvas: a succession of protruding nailheads.

According to Joe Stanfield, Director of Fine Art at Rago/Wright: “Miyoko Ito used long, tubular bands of color and layers upon layers of paint to build strikingly beautiful abstractions and was at the height of her powers while working in Chicago in the 1970s. She often left the nails around the stretcher partially tacked, creating an almost sculptural experience and a truly unique, signature style. Kachina was acquired by George Irwin in 1973 from the now-famous dealer Phyllis Kind, the year the work was painted. George Irwin was a major supporter of Chicago artists and dealers, and his collection included works by seminal Chicago artists Gertrude Abercrombie, H.C. Westermann, and Ed Flood, along with paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by some of the most important artists of the 20th century, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Jacques Lipchitz.”

In the six years since Kachina, 1973 was last offered at auction by Toomey & Co., Ito's posthumous reputation has risen to an unprecedented level, with the art world now fully celebrating the quiet profundity and technical brilliance of the oeuvre of this essential Chicago artist. Following an exhibition dedicated to Ito at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2017, Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City organized a retrospective of her work in 2023 and a corresponding, illustrated book was published in early 2024 entitled Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts. Ito works are currently held by several major institutions and auction prices for her paintings have increased nearly tenfold in recent years.