Miya Ando

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Miya Ando, photo by Roy Ritchie

New York based artist Miya Ando uses a variety of materials to create paintings, sculptures, and installations that refer to fleeting natural phenomena, space, time, and our transitory existence. Ando’s clouds in glass cubes, charred redwood sculptures, and her paintings of conceptualized landscapes are an articulation of the principle that all forms comprising the universe are temporary. The artist often uses metal as a substrate for her paintings, as the refractive surfaces shift and change with the light, further engaging the viewer in an experience of the impermanent. Researching Japanese literature and historical texts, Ando locates poetic, multilayered language describing the varied qualities of moonlight, clouds, rain, and other elements — language that expresses a philosophy of existence and a relationship to nature which she seeks to preserve in visual form. By translating these Japanese descriptions into English for the titles of her artworks, Ando reveals the variations in thought and perception between the two cultures that have informed her identity and experience.

Miya Ando Equanimity (Meditations) exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, 2020

Born in Los Angeles in 1973, Miya Ando’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Asia Society Museum, Houston; The Noguchi Museum, New York; Savannah College Of Art and Design Museum, Savannah; The Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor; and The American University Museum, Washington DC. Her work has also been included in recent group exhibitions at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Haus Der Kunst, Munich; The Bronx Museum; and The Queens Museum of Art, NY. Ando’s work is included in the public collections of LACMA; The Nassau County Museum; The Corning Museum of Glass; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Luft Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Museum of Art and History; among other public institutions as well as in numerous private collections. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel installed in Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.