Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942, Tokyo) is a Japanese-born American visual and performance artist based in New York, associated with feminist art, minimalism and postminimalism. She studied at the Contemporary Art Research Studio in Tokyo from 1962 to 1964, then emigrated to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League until 1968. Combining formalist minimalism with a foregrounding of the artist's hand, her work offers subtle, ironic commentary on the masculinity of male-dominated minimalism, and she has been called "a preeminent feminist figure of minimalism."
Rakuko Naito (b. 1935, Tokyo) is a Japanese American artist who moved from Tokyo to New York, where she has lived and worked ever since. Beginning as an optical art painter in the early 1960s, she explored acrylics, spray paint and masking tape, eventually focusing on delicate, monochromatic assemblages of manipulated, layered and curled strips of kozo washi, a traditional Japanese paper, which she has explored for the past three decades. With a natural affinity for order and structure, her work relies on the repetition of actions and decisions and avoids narrative. Her papers are held in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, and she is represented by Maya Frodeman Gallery. Her work appears in "Hard Line Women" at Nonaka-Hill.
Artworks in this exhibition
Rakuko Naito. Photo by Thomas Haar, courtesy of The Mayor Gallery
Stephen Westfall (b. 1953) is a painter known for his particular brand of geometric abstraction. He received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his first solo exhibition, in 1984 at Tracey Garet in New York's East Village, drew reviews noting that approach. Exhibitions followed through the 1980s and 1990s at Daniel Newburg Gallery in New York, Galerie Paal in Munich and Galerie Wilma Lock in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and in 1995 at Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York, followed by several exhibitions at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. and Galerie Zurcher in Paris. Recent work has been shown at Kunstgalerie Bonn, David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe and Alexandre Gallery in New York, which represents him. He taught for twenty years as a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. His exhibition is on view at Serious Topics in Los Angeles.
