A new exhibition tells the story of three American women of Japanese descent and expands the story of American Art.
By Ashley Busby
In recent years, the museum world has highlighted the work of previously underrecognized artists, in part to reenergize collections and tell new stories, but more importantly as a means to question the rigidity of the canon. “Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo,” a new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) on view through August 17, 2025, draws attention to three pioneering American women artists of Japanese descent. Despite often invisible barriers to success, such as race, gender, and painting style, and the very real challenges they faced, including displacement and mass incarceration during World War II, each woman persisted and sustained her own impressive creative voice.
Miné Okubo, Wind and Dust, 1943. Opaque watercolor on paperboard, 19 x 24 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase. © The Miné Okubo Charitable Cor-poration. Photo by Lucia RM Martino. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Curated by ShiPu Wang, Coats Family Chair in the Arts, and professor at the University of California, Merced, and organized by the Japanese American National Museum, the exhibition is coordinated at SAAM by Melissa Ho, curator of twentieth-century art, with Anna Lee, curatorial assistant for Asian American art. Of the exhibition’s importance, Wang notes, “[The show] aims to direct more attention toward these artists’ diverse bodies of work that belong in and enrich the broader stories of American art.” According to Ho, the exhibition is part of a SAAM initiative to foster scholarship on Asian Pacific American artists. The institution has also acquired six works by Hibi and Okubo for its permanent collection, a move that will allow these artists to “take their rightful place as part of the cultural inheritance of our nation.”
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Hisako Hibi, Floating Clouds, April 1944. Oil on canvas, 19 1⁄16 x 23 x 1 1⁄2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative
Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953) immigrated to California at age nine. In the 1920s, she studied on scholarship at Berkeley’s School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts and later at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. She had her first solo exhibition in 1929 at the Golden Gate Institute. Critically praised as a “genius,” she was recognized for her observational skill. In the decade that followed, she exhibited widely to much acclaim. Following the 1942 enactment of Executive Order 9066, Hayakawa avoided internment by relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she continued to make art until her death from cancer.
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Hisako Hibi, Waiting for Bus to Work, 1955. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in.
The Hibi Estate. Photo by ShiPu Wang
“Pictures of Belonging” highlights Hayakawa’s skills as a portraitist. In One Afternoon (c. 1935) the artist depicts “Edward,” a model who appears in other works from the period. The painting serves as a testament to Hayakawa’s formal experimentation in line with modernist tendencies. Moreover, as Wang argues, “For diasporic artists, creating portraits…enable[d] them to… capture that deep engagement with another person, memorialize their relationship and shared experience, render their own existence visible, and, most crucially, affirm a sense of belonging for both the model and the artist.”
Also born in Japan, Hisako Hibi (1907-1991) arrived in San Francisco in 1920. In 1926 she enrolled at the California School of Arts where she met her husband, fellow first-generation immigrant and artist Matsusaburo George Hibi. They moved to Hayward, CA in the 1930s to raise a family but remained active participants in a uniquely international, diverse, and receptive Bay Area art scene.
This all ended in 1942, when Hibi and her family were uprooted from their lives, first forced to live in a horse stable at Tanforan Assembly Center and then eventually relocated to Utah’s Topaz War Relocation Center. Even during her internment, Hibi remained dedicated to art. She helped arrange children art classes and produced over 70 plein air landscape paintings, such as Floating Clouds (April 1944), that documented Topaz’s harsh high desert environment.