MIYA ANDO

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Miya Ando is an American Japanese artist known for her metal paintings that encapsulate both ephemerality and permanence. A descendant of Bizen sword makers, Miya Ando spent her childhood among Buddhist priests in a temple in Okayama, Japan, and later, in California. She combines the traditional techniques of her ancestry with modern industrial technology, skillfully transforming sheets of metal into ephemeral, abstract paintings suffused with color. Working across two and three dimensions, Ando’s oeuvre contains abstract painting and sculpture, including large-scale public art pieces that reflect the transitory essence of life.

Blending the natural with the industrial, Ando utilizes the enduring materiality of metal with evanescent scenes of the environment. Her self-developed process of painting into the surface of the aluminum creates tranquil, mutable scenes of the atmosphere. Ando applies heat, sandpaper, grinders, acid and patinas to the metal canvases, irrevocably altering the material’s chemical properties. Her glass sculptures capture cloud formations through infinitesimal fractures within. Beauty can always be found in these fleeting, temporary moments of existence.

Miya Ando has a Bachelor of Arts degree in East Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended Yale University to study Buddhist iconography and imagery. She apprenticed with the master metalsmith Hattori Studio in Japan, followed by a residency at Northern California’s Public Art Academy.

Ando’s work has been shown worldwide, including recent solo shows at the Hammond Museum, North Salem, New York, and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia. Her work has also been exhibited at The Noguchi Museum, New York; Katzen Arts Center, American University Museum, Washington D. C.; the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, California, in a show curated by Nat Trotman of the Guggenheim Museum; and in an exhibition at the Queens Museum, New York. 

Ando has also produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture in London built from World Trade Center steel to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2012.

 

Born in Los Angeles, 1973