“Michi Itami: A Movement in Print” will open at Mark Borghi Gallery in Sag Harbor on April 29. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 30, from 5 to 8 PM and the show will run through May 19.
Itami is a visual artist known for her printmaking, ceramics, paintings and digital art. “A Movement in Print” will showcase Itami’s unique printmaking style with work spanning over 30 years. Among the selection, prints utilizing authentic Japanese stencil, intaglio, woodblock, computer generated imagery and monoprinting are made on surfaces such as tissue, rice and rag paper.
As a child, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Itami was sent with her mother to Manzanar, an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in California.
In his speech to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was “a date which will live in infamy.” The attack on Pearl Harbor also launched a rash of fear about national security, especially on the West Coast. In February 1942, just two months later, President Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans. The order authorized the Secretary of War and military commanders to evacuate all persons deemed a threat from the West Coast to internment camps, that the government called “relocation centers.”
There were several young artistic women who were interned at that time, one was Ruth Asawa the other Michi Itami.
Her father, Akira Itami, was released, however, after he volunteered for the U.S. Army. His work deciphering Japanese military communications and gathering intelligence data earned him the Legion of Merit for exceptional service. After the war, he was posted to Japan as an officer in the American-led occupation, and went on to serve as head interpreter at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. In 1947, Itami and her mother, Kimi, joined him in Japan, where they lived for the next three years. While there, her father “saw that I was artistic, and he hired people to teach me drawing at home,” said Itami.
“Those teachers were so happy to make any money at all. War-torn countries are not lovely. It was sad.”
When she was 12, her father committed suicide.
“He got all kinds of medals for his service in Tokyo. It was very tragic. I think he felt misunderstood.” Itami’s parents were kibei, or U.S.-born Japanese-Americans who were educated in Japan.
“I think that being a kibei . . . was difficult for him,” she told The Japan Times in a 2005 interview. “Nisei [second generation Japanese-Americans] did not trust kibei because they were so different from themselves. And he was alienated from other kibei because he was too intelligent to believe the propaganda of the Japanese military government at the time.”
Itami returned to Los Angeles with her mother, and in 1959 she earned a degree in English literature from U.C.L.A. After doing graduate work at Columbia University in Japanese and English literature, she returned to Japan for a year on a Fulbright grant to study ceramics, and went on to earn an M.F.A. in ceramic design from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971.
After teaching at Hayward and then at the San Francisco Art Institute, Itami moved east in 1988 to teach at the City University of New York. She taught at CUNY for more than 20 years, becoming head of its M.F.A. program, and receiving, in 2004, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.
Her work is held in major museum collections including The Brooklyn Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan.
Other public collections featuring her work include the Library of Congress, The Estée Lauder Foundation, and the State of Hawaii, as well as several university art museums. She has sold many works to private collectors through her long-time collaboration with A.I.R. Gallery in New York.
You can find her complete work on her website, michi-itami.com.