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This gives the paintings a studded halo, like sacred tapestries.
They slow us down and accentuate our here-ness, offering an introspective realm to enter.
Ito died in 1983 at the age of 65.
She said she worked sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, while raising two children in Chicago.
I met her twice there in the 1970s.
Instead, they veered into figuration, cartooning, fantasy, and wild color.
Yet even after the art world caught up to Imagism, Ito remained overlooked.
She is only now starting to get her due; her art would stand out in any museum collection.
Born to Japanese parents in 1918, her father worked as a houseboy in California.
The family arrived September 1923, one day after the Yokohama earthquake that killed over 140,000 people.
Her mother soon gave birth to a stillborn child.
Everything was terribly traumatic, Ito said.
Going to school was very traumatic.
I was very, very ill, extremely ill, to the point that I couldnt walk anymore.
She had what she called a childhood nervous breakdown.
Of her parents, she said, My parents were very irresponsible.
She said, You cannot help but be race conscious when youre segregated.
No matter: In 1942, the couple married to avoid being separated in the camps.
While Ito was allowed to attend Smith College the following year, her husband remained interned until 1945.
In 1944, she moved to Chicago, where she spent the rest of her life.
Her art career there was up and down.
She showed often in Chicago.
But sales were few.
That is what I noticed about women painters, she said.
They would go on no matter what.
Some men painters will become so discouraged after a big splash.
Painting, she said, is the only healing thing in my life.
Surfaces build up like grained fresco.
Creamsicle salmon colors bask in sunshine.
Paint strokes are orderly, never gestural, giving her work an underlying solidity and structure.
One of the most beguiling aspects of her art are the tiny spaces between her larger forms.
They fill her paintings with shimmers of supernal otherness.
There are forms that resemble shrines and the ancient tomb mounds surrounding Nagoya.
There is a flatness and a descending order of images that recall a calligraphic scroll.
