American Herstory: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo - Origins and Belonging in the Asian American Art
“What is an Asian American woman artist?” Karin Higa posed this question in 2002 while she was senior curator at the Japanese American National Museum. She explored the topic in an essay published in the catalog for Art/Women/California: Parallels and Intersections, 1950–2000, an exhibition at the San José Museum of Art. That project sought to reconstruct the history of women artists active in California during the second half of the 20th century, recognizing the Golden State as a hub of radical activism. Particular attention was given to artists who arrived in California from the Pacific Area and Latin America in the post–World War II period, driven by increasing migration flows. Following in the legacy of Karin Higa—who passed away prematurely in 2013—the exhibition Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo is one of the most significant recent shows dedicated to celebrating the work of Asian American artists. On view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., through August 17, 2025, the exhibition is organized by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles, where it will conclude its tour in late 2026, after beginning its journey at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and making stops at various venues.
The exhibition, through the stories of three women artists who personally experienced the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—or who, like Miki Hayakawa, still suffered its consequences—invites viewers not only to rediscover this memory and shed light on a tragic chapter in history but also to reflect on how art should not be understood solely through an identity-based or historical lens.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, with Executive Order 9066 signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, thousands of innocent people were imprisoned just because of their heritage, unjustly considered a potential threat to national security.
This event undoubtedly marked the artistic paths of these women, but what stands out forcefully is how these artists managed to gain critical acclaim in the United States despite belonging to a minority historically marginalized by major artistic circles. These were the years, between 1882 and 1965, of the Exclusion Era, a period defined by laws that hindered the integration of Asians into the United States.
While the curators of Pictures of Belonging emphasize that the experience of the internment camps was not an identity-defining element for these artists, the exhibition is chronologically structured around the experience of war.
The display divides their artistic production into three phases: before, during, and after the conflict. Moreover, the internment had a significant impact on their careers, as many of their works were lost at the end of the war, depriving the artists of part of their artistic heritage and further complicating their recognition in the American art scene.
The exhibition now navigates the current context, shaped by recent inclusivity policies—both in the arts and beyond—that have also impacted the Smithsonian Institution and other national institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art. Recently, both announced the closure of their diversity offices following the executive order signed by President Donald J. Trump. As of now, it remains uncertain what space will be reserved for exhibitions like Pictures of Belonging, which presents works recently acquired by the SAAM as part of a multi-year initiative aimed at expanding and enhancing the visibility of Asian American art.
Despite the fact that the Asian American community is often a target of the so-called “model minority” myth—viewed as less subject to discrimination than other ethnic groups—its history is deeply intertwined with the civil rights movements that erupted in the United States in the late 1960s. The Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), founded between 1968 and 1969 at the University of California, Berkeley, coined the term Asian American to unify various Asian communities under a single political identity. The group also advocated for the recognition of historical injustices, such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
But how did the women artists featured in this exhibition confront the challenges of those years?
Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953) and Hisako Hibi (1907-1991) were born in Japan and immigrated to the Pacific Coast in the early decades of the 20th century. While Hayakawa managed to avoid internment by relocating to New Mexico, Hibi experienced it in all its severity, leaving behind an intense and direct testimony of her time in the Topaz internment camp. Like Miné Okubo (1912-2001), Hisako Hibi continued to create art during her imprisonment, turning the internment into a period of extraordinary artistic output. Miné Okubo, born in California to Japanese parents, created one of the most significant visual testimonies of the internment: Citizen 13660 (1946), an illustrated volume that lucidly documents daily life in the camps. For her, art was not only a form of resistance but also the means by which she regained her freedom. In January 1944, she was able to leave Topaz through a collaboration with Fortune magazine, which opened the doors to New York, where she worked as an illustrator. At the time of her internment, Miné Okubo had already begun a promising artistic career: after earning a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938, she won the prestigious Bertha Taussig Memorial Traveling Fellowship, which allowed her to study in Europe, including Paris, where she was a student of Fernand Léger.
After the war, their careers took different paths, but what had united their work up until that point was the influence of American modernism from the 1920s and 1930s, which developed in response to the 1913 Armory Show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art that introduced the works of European artists such as Picasso, Duchamp, and Matisse to the American public. This modernist influence is evident in the portraits—often of women—and still life paintings of Miki Hayakawa. The exhibition opens with One Afternoon (ca. 1935), a painting depicting her companion from that time, in a style reminiscent of post-impressionism and Cézanne’s lessons. A large part of Hisako Hibi’s work is also deeply connected to European modernism. In the 1950s, while studying in New York with Victor D’Amico, the master provocatively told her, “Cézanne is dead.” In Floating Clouds (1944), one of the most significant works tied to her experience at Topaz, the influence of Cézanne is still palpable. The volumes and geometries of the clouds, sculpted in the sky above the camp, are heavy, monumental, almost oppressive, in stark contrast to the desire for freedom inscribed on the back of the work: “Free, free, I want to be free; free as the clouds I see up above Topaz.” The fiery skies of Morning (1942) also evoke expressionist suggestions, recalling the landscapes of Munch.
To revisit the question of identity raised by Karin Higa, how much of Japanese identity is reflected in the works of these artists? And how much, instead, is their language the result of a dialogue with Western modernism?
In the case of Hisako Hibi, the snow-capped mountains towering in the background of works such as A Puddle (1944) and With Mother (1944) may evoke one of the most iconic themes of Ukiyo-e prints, made famous by Katsushika Hokusai: Mount Fuji, the sacred symbol of Japan. However, these references do not seem to signify a direct connection with the Japanese artistic tradition, but rather a reflection of Japonisme already filtered through the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist influences that Hibi had adopted as a point of reference. Following the advice of her teacher Victor D’Amico, in the 1960s the artist began to question her own artistic language, more consciously drawing on her cultural heritage. Her research led her to experiment with abstraction incorporating calligraphic symbols inspired by Japanese ink painting, as seen in Autumn (1967), where her style is also influenced by American Abstract Expressionism.
Miné Okubo, starting in the 1960s, developed a language characterized by bright, vivid colors with an increasingly essential and synthetic line.
Miki Hayakawa’s case is different, as her premature death in Santa Fe in 1953 leaves the question open of how her artistic exploration might have evolved in the following decades.
This exhibition represents a significant step toward recognizing the contributions of these three artists to the history of American art. It goes beyond a historical reimagining, also shedding light on the courage these women showed in emerging as artists during a period of social and political exclusion. Miné Okubo, for example, had even collaborated with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in San Francisco on a commission from the United States Army. Before the war, Miki Hayakawa had exhibited in museums such as the Los Angeles Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and at the Golden Gate International Exposition. In 1985, Hisako Hibi received an Honorary Award from the San Francisco Arts Commission, which also dedicated a major solo show to her.
Therefore, references to their origins, whether explicit or not, should not be viewed as labels but as elements woven into their artistic trajectories and their desire to fully integrate their work into the landscape of American art. The goal is to reignite attention on figures like these, long overshadowed by the scarcity of their works in American museums, and assert that their rightful place is, now more than ever, in the history of American art.
Sources: Fuller, Burgess, Salvioni, and Chadwick, eds. Art/Women/California, 1950-2000: Parallels and Intersections. San José: San José Museum of Art, 2002. Ho, M. (2023, May 1). Historic New Acquisitions by Two Trailblazing Japanese American Painters. SAAM. https://americanart.si.edu/blog/japanese-american-artists-hibi Miné Okubo. JANM. https://www.janm.org/exhibits/mine-okubo-masterpiece/okubo Spring, K. Mine Okubo. (2017). National Women's History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mine-okubo The Editors of ARTnews. (2025, January 29). Smithsonian bows to Trump diversity order. ARTnews. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/smithsonian-bends-to-trumps-diversity-order-romanian-museum-considers-lawsuit-against-dutch-museum-views-on-mona-lisas-potential-new-digs-morning-links-for-january-29-2025-1234731100/
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