Sacramento, 1975

With its soft, warm colors and suggestions of a light-bathed landscape glimpsed through a window, Miyoko Ito's Sacramento is an elegy to the artist's native state. The structured composition's lines and shapes hint at iconic elements of the landscape of California's Central Valley: expansive vistas of flat cropland, the rounded forms of distant mountains, and the orb of the setting sun. To subtly modulate and texture her planes of soft color, the artist applied a paint-laden brush in short strokes. Evoking rather than representing her subject, Ito honored the nature of memory as a highly subjective language of sense impressions that assume a dream-like intangibility over time. "Allusive abstraction" is how she and several other like-minded Chicago artists aptly described their approach to non-representational but suggestive painting.

For her late paintings, Ito often attached the canvas edges to the stretcher with nails driven only partway into the wood, stipulating that the painting be left unframed. Her distinctive treatment of her canvases emphasizes the fundamental materiality of her medium and complements the elemental purity of her non-objective painted compositions.

Born in Berkeley, California, Ito with her husband was interned along with more than 100,000 other Japanese Americans after the start of World War II. Following studies at the University of California at Berkeley and at Smith College, she settled in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood in 1944 and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ito once described herself as "a painter wife who has raised two children," and she struggled to continue her art, painting at home in a spare bedroom.2 Nonetheless, by the 1960s she was recognized as an important figure in the development of abstract painting in her adopted city. When Ito painted Sacramento in the mid-1970s, she was a fellow at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In her fellowship application, she wrote that her art was influenced by the landscapes of both Japan, where she spent five years of her childhood, and California.