On the Cusp of Now or Never: Going to Greece

A romantic view of the city of Athens. In my dreams. photo, greeking.me

Santorini. photo by greeka.com

I just booked a tour to Greece with Gate 1 Travel.  Going with my daughter Elissa, in mid-October. We are so excited. Elissa will be looking for gluten-free baklava, like the gluten-free fish and chips she found in Dublin! I'll be looking for antiquities and rainbows. 

"But, Fran, what about COVID and all the issues around travelling?" 

Yes, I know. It's a bit  risky. Lots of uncertainties.  We might have to cancel, and reschedule.  

"Can you even fly into Greece? It'll be like going to India, which I can't even watch on television. It's being called an "apocrolypic explosion," that's how bad it is. Fareed Zakaria's 85-year-old mom died of it."

Yes, sad. The explosion of COVID in India is tragic. Greece has had a rough time of it, for sure, but it's not India, thank goodness. The Greek government has been on it with mask and distancing mandates, I think even before we were, and  people are now being vaccinated. Greece relies on tourism. And just this month, it opened to foreign travelers. You need proof you're fully vaccinated.  

Also, this is a tour with a wonderful professional company that I've traveled with before, to Sicily, Barcelona, the coasts of France and Italy, Cinque Terra, and Ireland. They take care of all the details. 

"Why not wait a little longer, to be on the safe side?" 

Athens. Photo, tripadvisor.com

That's something to think about. You know the saying about adding life to your years? Greece has long been a dream, since college days, when we read Plato and Aristotle and learned the history of democracy.  Also, after a trip to Sicily with my sister Andy, the birthplace of our maternal grandmother, I wanted to learn more about what I think could be a Greek heritage as well. 

And I can't resist saying it, but I feel as if  I am on the cusp of now or never, as I told Andy. If not now, when?  It's kind of the same feeling I had joining the Peace Corps at age 69 and turning 70 in Ukraine. The unknowns were enormous. Same with deciding to leave Florida in 2011 and return to Toledo. The unknowns of traveling during the Time of COVID are too. 

"What do you think, Mom?" Elissa asked. We'll just wait and see, I replied. She agrees.

Gate I Greece tour plus we're adding extension to Santorini.

https://gr.usembassy.gov/covid-19-information/

https://www.ontheluce.com/ancient-city-akrotiri-santorini/

https://www.google.com/search?q=Athens,+Greece&rlz=_

Women love Flowers

Addendum: I am adding some more flowers by women artists below, at the end of this blog, because they are so skillfully rendered and lovely in every way--form, shape, color, perspective, composition, distinctiveness.

Anna Blackburne, British
naturalist artist, 1726-1793 

Francoise de Felice, Italian-French, born in Paris in 1952. She studied art at the Sorbonne. At 20 she moved to Sicily, where the Sicilian Baroque style inspired her work. Women and flowers, forever in bloom.

What delights us most, even during this time of COVID? What brings unmitigated joy? What makes us smile? 

Flowers. Yes, all kinds of flowers. Women love flowers. We see in flowers, in every single flower actually, a whole world of energy and beauty.  It's like returning to the  Garden of Eden and traveling from there on a flowery path to our very own gardens.  

The flowers painted by women skilled in the art of still life are like a perpetual garden in every season. They are forever young, forever blooming, in every age, across time and space.  Old age does not diminish them. Old age becomes them. 

And they are as diverse and unique as the artists who created them and bring them to still life and our lives. Their flowers bloom not only in Spring but year-round, in profusion, for eternity.  That's why these women artists who painted in the shadows of better known male artists are becoming well known themselves, and increasingly popular, from grand auction houses and myriad galleries, to internet sites such as Pinterest, Etsy and Artnet.  Whether its an original or a print, we can surround ourselves with the exquisite talent of women artists from any historic period. 

Here are a few of the thousands of flowers in the aesthetic gardens of women artists from around the world and mostly in chronological order of the historical period in which they worked.  

Anna Blackburne, British, 1726-1793, was a British naturalist, an interest she inherited from her father, a natural historian and collector. She learned Latin in order to improve her knowledge, and started her own collection as well. The power of curious woman who lived in every era of human history! She was in contact with famous naturalist like Linnaeus and Johan Foster, both of whom named several species in her honor. Who knew! Also her brother, who lived in the US, sent her many specimens, especially of birds, which she also painted. Although her art was rather ingloriously dispersed and sold off to god knows where, it's wonderful that Sothebys has rounded up a wonderful collection that it sells at auction. So glad to know this.

Jessica Hayllar, c.1858-1940, was born in London, the youngest of 9 children. The 5 sisters in this large family were given art lessons by their father, James, a well-known painter at the time. Jessica became the most prolific artist among the Hayllar offspring, although her sister Edith also achieved some recognition. Jessica exhibited at the Royal Academy in London regularly between 1879 and 1915 and also had works shown at the Society of British Artists and other venues. She painted domestic scenes, local villagers, and family gatherings. The family lived at Castle Priory, Wallingford, on the banks of the Thames, and many of her works depict the happy, settled life they enjoyed there. In her later years she mostly concentrated on painting flowers, as shown here, in a kind of Pre-Raphaelite realism she apparently inherited from her father. Her works sell very well through Christie's, whose collection includes art from Jessica's other sisters, always nice to learn.

Jane Peterson, American, 1876-1965, was born in Elgin, Illinois, and was a graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  She is known for her richly painted sill lifes and beach scenes along the Massachusset's coast. 

Fishing Boats, Gloucester, MA,
at the Brooklyn Museum.

She travelled widely and studied as she did so, including under some well-known European artists. She also taught art in the US and abroad. Around 1912 she became associated with a group of American artists that included John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, and Maurice Prendergast.  Her works are held at the Metropolitan in NY. the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Hirschorn in Washington, DC. I'll have to look for them next time I'm in those cities. I love this bright bouquet of zinnias, which may well have been influenced by her work and travels with the Spanish  artist Joaquin Sorolla (another new name for me). 

Laura Wheeler Waring, 1887-1948, African-American, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, became a painter and educator. She went to the highly regarded Pennsylvania School of the Arts, travelled and painted in France, and returned to the States to teach and continue her art.  This young girl is surrounded by flowers, lifting her up with hope at a time when White Supremacy raged in America. 

Dod Procter, born Doris Margaret Shaw, a British artist, 1890-1972, attended art schools in England and in Paris along with her husband Ernest, where they were both influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism. Her husband joined a French Ambulance Unit during World War I, a powerful impact on their lives and work. Dod Procter was an active artist after the untimely death of her husband in 1935. That's when she also travelled to the United States, Canada, Jamaica and Africa. She died in 1972. Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy on many occasions, considered a triumph for women artists. She painted more portraits then still lifes, but I like this painting. Also this turn of the century period was one of the most prolific for women artists around the world. 

Amy Katherine Browning 1881-1978, was born in Bedfordshire, UK. She entered the Royal College of Art in 1899, and spent several years off and on studying and teaching there until 1906. I was delighted to learn that she was a friend of the  English suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst and that they worked together on an art exhibition for the Women's Social and Political Union in 1909. This was a time when American Suffragists were learning from their active English counterparts and began holding parades and public protests for suffrage. Browning continued to paint after painful years of World War I, supporting herself by teaching. She exhibited at the Paris Salon and won several awards for her work.  She also took commissions, including one for a portrait of Winston Churchill.  She died in 1978, her legacy preserved in several museums and galleries in the UK.  I like these flowers, kind of askew, thrown in a vase without much ado, but endearing. 

Bibi Zogbe, Lebanese, 1885-1973, Thistles. 

Bibi Zogbe, Cherry Trees in Flower

Bibi Zogbe was born in the Lebanese seaside village of Sahel Alma. She emigrated to Argentina at the age of sixteen. Her professional artistic career began in the 1930's with a number of exhibitions in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, in Chile and Uruguay, in Paris and elsewhere. At the end of the Second World War, she lived in Paris and Dakar and from there she went to Lebanon in 1947, a long-awaited dream. She had a one-woman exhibition which soon gained her fame. Her flower paintings are one of a kind, exquisite, special. Some call them a "microcosm of Lebanon, «Paradise of Eden» a garden endlessly in blossom, symbol of the birth of  life. The profusion of flowers in her work evokes an eternal spring, delicate and colorful. Art historian Charles Corms said of Bibi: “All the flowers of the world smile on us a day and then are gone, but her flowers will never perish away for she has put into them the clear immortal fire of her heart."  I have fallen in love with Bibi Zogbe. Maybe I should buy one of her works? 

Faith Ringgold, born in Harlem in 1936, Surrounded by Flowers. 

Sunflower Quilting Group

Faith Ringgold was one of the most talented artist of  the Harlem Renaissance, a painter, quilter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher. She went to the City College of New York (CCNY), travelled in Europe in the 1960s, a time of  raging Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war protests, creating her first political paintings there.  Returning to the States, she moved toward sculptor and mixed media, establishing her voice and her legacy in the 1970s and 80s until today. She wrote several books, including art books for children, and an autobiography, "We Flew Over the Bridge" (1995). She is professor emeritus at the U of California, San Diego, where she taught from 1987-2002. She now lives and works in Englewood, NJ.  An extraordinary talent, and a favorite of art collectors.

Gwendolyn Knight, Barbados-American,  1913-2005. She moved to the US as a foster child and rose against the odds to become a bright light among the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She was, I only now discovered, the wife of the famed artist Jacob Lawrence, whose Migration series remains a monumental work of art. I remember seeing the exhibit at the Phillips Collection in DC. Knight was able to find her own voice and to begin painting in mid-life into her later years. "When your spouse is Jacob Lawrence," wrote journalist Herb Boyd in an article in the Amsterdam, NewYork News in 2019, "getting out of his impressive shadow can be daunting. But Gwendolyn managed to step from his glow and shine her own artistic light and legacy, while retaining her birth surname." 

Georgia O'Keefe, Purple Petunias, 1924. These bold petunias accidently (by some click) got wedded to Beneke-Molenaar's roses, below, so here it is. 

Yvette Beneke-Molenaar, contemporary, lives and paints in Cape Town, South Africa, Roses in a Vase. Her prints are popular on Pinterest, Etsy,Artnet, etc. And they are pretty, and some intriquing.
https://www.facebook.com/yvetteart/

Georgia O'Keeffe, (1887-1986), Red Canna, 1915. I thought her purple petunias were here, but we got this lovely watercolor.  Always O'Keeffe.

Fiona Craig, Australian, contemporary, grew up in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, and currently resides in the US. She attended art groups and schools, both academic and non-academic, which gave her a broad arts and crafts experience. Her works are in private, corporate, institutional and public collections in Australia, the US and other countries. She specializes in floral, landscape and portrait painting in oils, pastels and watercolors. "I am constantly inspired by the contrasts between Australian flora and landscapes and those of North America. I like to compose dramatic displays that bring the art audience closer to appreciating nature."   Aren't these the most gorgeous Iris!

Charlotte Sabbagh, Danish, lives in US, contemporary, Spring
Danish artist Charlotte Sabbagh currently lives in Rowayton, CT. She studied in New York at Parsons Fine Arts program, NYC Studio School and Silvermine, CT. She gets her inspiration from her native country, where she spends each summer. She is drawn to the contrast of light and dark in the water, sky horizons, atmosphere and the natural beauty of the world we live in. These images are expressed in the colors, textures and mixed media used in each painting. Her catalog of work consists of abstract paintings using oils, acrylics and mixed media and she shows widely. “Art is public by nature, yet a complex echo of the inner self” — Charlotte Sabbagh

Some sources, for more information and images:

https://www.google.com/search?q=anna+blackburne+artist+sotheby%27s%27&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiyyb6865 
 Click on this link for a whole series from its Sotheby's Blackburne collection that it sells at auction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Blackburne 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Hayllar 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Peterson 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dod_Procter 

https://www.invaluable.com/artist/zogbe-bibi-i9wq5ns4xe/sold-at-auction-prices/ Bibi Zogbe, 1890 -1973.  Click on this link to see some of Zogbe's lovely art at BP Parity auction house. I love seeing women artists selling at places like Christie's, some priced out of most of our ranges, but a few less dear. Her work is fabulous,distinctive, in museums and lots of private collections.  So glad I discovered her. 

https://www.onefineart.com/artists/painters/Bibi-Zogbe, good bio information.  

https://www.facebook.com/yvetteart/

https://www.fionacraig.com/contemporary Australian artists 

On right: Gwendolyn Knight painted more traditional works for friends, such as this bouquet of flowers. Lovely and dreamy. I have the feeling, reading about this wonderful woman, that if I had asked her for a painting, she would have done one, and I would have treasured it. 
On left, Suzanne Valadon got wedded to Knight, and can't fix it! See Addendum below.

https://www.gearygallery.com/?artists=charlotte-sabbagh, contemporary, Danish, lives in Connecticut.

http://brillyance.blogspot.com/2017/10/laura-wheeler-waring-1887-1948.html

https://www.faithringgold.com/

http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2019/nov/27/gwendolyn-knight-she-cast-her-own-artistic-light/ on Gwendolyn Knight.

Addendum: I am adding some more flowers by women artists from time to time, as they are posted on Female Artists in History and Celebration of Female Artists, because they are so skilled and lovely in every way--form, shape, color, perspective, distinctiveness. And we need to know about these great artists. Many are now collectibles, and popular, but I think more Museums should be adding them to their permanent collections and on their gallery walls. 

Suzanne Valadon, French, 1865-1938, Flowers in Vase.. A great period for women artists.

Grace Hartigan by Gordan Parks, which is why I love this! 

Grace Hartigan, American, 1922-2008,Abstract/Expressionist painter, Flowers in Red Vase.
She is fantastic. WOW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hartigan. Well known, highly collectible, popular on Pinterest and lie sites, her paintings are held by numerous major art institutions. Friend of Pollack and all the famed men who painted in NYC in the1940s and 1950s. She held her own. 

Mary Cassett, Lilacs in a Window, 1880 
I can smell these lush purple lilacs.  Viva Mary Cassett!

Sarah Blumenschein, Engineer and Artist, American, lives in Albuquerque, NM, contemporary, pastels and still lifes.

https://www.sarahblumenschein.com/gallery.htm

“I find myself primarily drawn to painting 'still life' because of the variety of colors, shapes, textures, and reflective surfaces possible. One of my favorite subjects is glass because of the way it both transmits and reflects the light. With each painting, I enjoy the challenge of capturing a strong sense of light and creating the illusion of 3-dimensions on a 2-dimensional surface.”

Women love Roses

Sarah Blumenschein, American, contemporary, "Three Roses."

In memory of my mom, Rose Lynn Luchetti Curro, July 1915-March 2003, from whom her children inherited a love of flowers and gardening and a habit of looking for beauty in everything, everywhere. 

Women love roses, and women painters have given us the gift of beautiful roses in abundance since time immemorial. We know the flowers of Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, but there are so many more women still life artists emerging from their shadows into the light of day. Since I've been looking deeper, I have found that female artists paint the most roses of all, and they are exquisite, in diverse genres and styles, in delightful palettes and complex detail, and in hundreds of different arrangements. Here are a few women artists overtime who have given us a world of roses without end.  

Inessa Morozova, Ukraine.
 

Inessa Morozova (Инесса Морозова), was born in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, in 1981. I've written about her in previous blogs, enamoured because she is contemporary and from Ukraine. She graduated from the Solntsevo Art school and the Humanitarian  Applied Institute.  I didn't know of her when I lived there, but I'm sure if I returned to Kiev, I'd find her painting on the descent of Andreevsky Street near Maiden Square. She paints flowers and children, much like her predecessors. I love the lushness of her roses in this work. Though she is a modern-day artist, some of her works remind me of early 20th-century women artists on whose shoulders she stands, including that of Irene Klestova (see below).   

Catharina Klein, Germany 1861-1929, was born in Eylau in what was then East Prussia, which became a Russian province called Kallinigrad. She moved to Berlin to study art and begin painting in earnest. She "rode the crest of chromo lithography" at the end of the 19th and into the 20th Century. She was also known as Catherine Klein, "anglicized outside of Germany during WWI to avoid any disinclination to buy her work." I found this an interesting fact that echoes what many German-Americans did during the war, which unleashed an ugly anti-German hysteria. Her signature, "C.Klein,"  usually accompanies her work, especially in the hundreds of postcards and prints she did of her original paintings, which were in oil or gouache, an opaque watercolor paint.  Artists like Klein have found new audiences through Pinterest and other online sites. I can see why.

Suzanne Valadon, French, 1865-1938, born in poverty in Montmartre, worked all her life to earn her keep, including  with a circus for a time, and also modeling for artists like Renoir. She was mostly self-taught but learned from the many artists who lived in Montmartre, an artist colony to this day. According to Wikipedia she was the first woman artist admitted to the Societe National Beaux Arts. I like this simple red rose. 

Here she is (left), depicted in Renoir's 1883 painting Dance at Bougival, Lovely, isn't she? 

Ethel Elizabeth Foster, American, 1873-1928, "Mixed Bouquet."

Ethel Elizabeth Foster was born in Pennsylvania,  and raised and lived in Washington, DC until her death. Her father was employed for many years as a clerk for the Department of Justice. She attended Columbia University in NY and was awarded a Fine Arts Diploma in 1901. She is listed as a public school teacher in the 1990 census, supervisor of drawing and artist in the 1910 census. Washington was home to lots of wonderful women artists at this time, and  I like to think they knew each other and supported each others' work. Many were public school teachers like Ethel Foster. 

Irene Klestova, Polish-Russian, 1908-1989, is probably the #1 painter of roses! Google her name and up will come beautiful rose after beautiful rose. She was well known in Leningrad, moved to Italy where she lived for 20 years, and then to Paris in the 1950s. She exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Hiver and the Salon des Artistes Independents. Known for her roses then as now, her works sell well in galleries and at auction today. 

Nan Greacen

, French-American, 1909-1999, Roses in a Glass Bowl, was born in Giverny, France, where her father Edmund Greacen was an impressionist painter actively following Claude Monet. Nan Greacen became a noted oil painter and watercolorist in her own right. She began earning awards from 1936, when she received the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design. She studied at a school created by her father in NYC in 1921, the Grand Central Art School. First I've heard of it. She taught drawing and still life at the school and wrote and illustrated two books on painting technique: Still Life is Exciting (1965) and The Magic of Flower Painting (1971).

Rachel Ruysch, Netherlands, 1664-1750, Still Life Of Flowers with a Nosegay of Roses, Marigolds, Larkspur,  a Bumblebee and Other Insects. She specialized in painting flowers, inventing her own style, popular in the heyday of the Dutch Golden Age. Her talent is being revived in these times of unearthing the power of women's painting.  I'm beginning to be able to identify Dutch paintings in this style from this period. They are so distinctive. Although Van Gogh and the male painters seem to dominate art galleries in Amsterdam, and I love seeing them, it's good to know that museums and galleries seem to be diversifying and broadening their collections. 

Alida Withoos, c. 1659 to 1730, was born in the Netherlands as well, to a family of artists headed by her father Matthias, a well-known artist at the time. Maybe she knew Rachel Ruysch. Alida  set off on her own and apparently thrived as a still life painter and botanical illustrator during the late seventeenth century.  She became part of a significant network of artists and botanical experts and amateurs. Although today we know little about her life, Alida Withoos contributed to some of the most important botanical artistic projects of her time. Catherine Powell, art historian at the University of Texas, noted that she "displayed enormous skill in illustrating highly detailed, life-like specimens of flowers and plants. Her illustrations were scientifically accurate and could be used for identification. They were also aesthetically pleasing and exceptional works of art in their own right." Powell  righty said "There are many Withoos, but only one Alida." She traveled widely, loved Rome, and lived much of her adult life in Amsterdam. Some of her works hang in the Rjiksmuseum, I'll look for them next time I'm there. 

We all recognize by now this stunning White Rose (1930) by 

Georgia O'Keeffe, the popular and highly esteemed artist from the prairies of Wisconsin, who studied art in Chicago and NYC, and fell in love and embraced the American Southwest from her Taos studio in New Mexico's high desert.  I love her flowers: large, bold, sensuous. 

Some sources:

https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/famous-female-renaissance-artists

https://galleries.brenau.edu/2020/09/24/person-place-thing-paintings-by-women-artists-in-brenaus-collection/.  A lovely collection at Brenau University in  Gainesville, Georgia, which might have begun as a women's college in Augusta. The gallery and collection were begun under President John S. Burd in 1985, and it has grown and expanded.                                                     

https://gardencollage.com/inspire/art-design/women-artists-legacy-floral-paintings/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Ruysch . It's amazing to me the story of so many women artists who achieved recognition in their own time, like Rachel Ruysch, but were then sidelined, marginalized and forgotten, only to be re-discovered in modern times. It's a story of how the Western Art Canon  was shaped by men with intention to obscure the works of women artists. 

https://www.averygallery.com/nan-greacen

https://artherstory.net/alida-withoos-creator-of-beauty-and-of-visual-knowledge/ by Catherine Powell, University of Texas. 

https://artliveandbeauty.blogspot.com/2020/08/artist-inessa-morozova-ukrainian-artist.html

https://www.askart.com/artist/Ethel_Elizabeth_Foster/10018349/Ethel_Elizabeth_Foster.aspx,   This painting is also in the Brenau collection, interestingly enough. 

http://www.artnet.com/artists/irene-klestova/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/01/georgia-okeeffe-tate-modern-exhibition-wild-beauty

Hiro: An Extraordinary Artist Embodies a Multicultural Perspective

EAST-WEST DIALOGUE is the dominant theme that
      threads through my artworks and reflects my cultural
      heritage. The multi-cultural perspective to my art
      expression has influenced how I view the process of art
      and the subjects I select to address in the language of
​      the visual arts. It is a life commitment to myself. 
Hiro, http://www.hiro-artist.com/   

I have one of this series, and treasure it.

While I was writing about Mine' Okubo and her art documenting the Japanese-American experience during the WWII Internment Camps, I remembered my dear friend Hiro, an artist and public humanities colleague from my days in Washington, DC. Hiro's art sprang up to me like the crocuses and daffodils now blooming in my garden. 

I am so glad this happened. Because Hiro is a visual  artist extraordinaire who introduced me to a wonderful world of multi-cultural expression. Her unique point of view fills her art and enlightens eveyone who sees it and hears her talk about it.     

Not that her art was ever far from my thoughts. I have a beautiful broadbrush painting of a Mother and Child that I prize to this day, from the series pictured here. So does my daughter Elissa, who now has it among her art collection, gracing her walls. It is a source of continuing joy.  

What I loved about Hiro's work then, and still do, is how her art, like her teaching and hundreds of public programs and performances, encompasses and illuminates issues of cultural diversity, race and gender, civil rights and justice, from the urban environment to the natural world. It is wonderful to learn that she is still doing this great work. Brilliant, constant, multicultural, universal. 

Like Okubo before her, Hiro is an American artist of Japanese ancestry. Her familial origins "are part of the history of Japan, traced from Genji to Meiji Japan and beyond. Her great, great grandfather was the founder and first mayor of Sapporo, an explorer of the Kuril Islands and a scholar." And like Okubo, Hiro melds the aesthetic, spirit and perspectives of her East-West heritage into her art, as in her life. That is what I always felt about Hiro's art.  Seeing it anew, with time and pespective, makes it even more engaging, more meaningful. Hiro was ahead of her time then and now. 

 

Hiro recalls being confronted with "the pain of prejudice" early on when she delivered her high school Valedictorian, The subject she chose was Executive Order 9066, the federal government's decision to round up and incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans into “internment camps” during World War II, including members of her family. She raised the question, “what is democracy and how does this policy conflict with the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the due process clause and equal rights under law.”  HIRO stood her ground. "Total Silence. Only my parents applauded proudly, ever so quietly," Hiro remembered.    

Throughout her broad-based University education, from science to the humanities, she held on to her vision of justice, culminating in choosing an art major at Columbia University, New York. From then on, art became HIRO’s primary commitment, her primary medium of expression. She became an art activist, "working for civil rights and justice through arts and culture."  

From  the 1970s, HIRO has been in the forefront of  the movement to introduce Asian American artists to the American art scene. As a young artist, she ran "a marathon of art activities, art exhibitions, and speaking engagements between New York and Washington, D.C."  She had many “firsts,” beginning in Manhattan with a solo exhibition of colorful 4-panel screen paintings in the 57th Street windows of Bergdorf Goodman. Before leaving New York City, HIRO recalled her "delight with the myriad of colors glittering in the night sky," which had enchanted her since childhood. This fascination influenced her to produce a series of Manhattan skyline paintings titled "City Lights, City Dreams." .

In the mid-1980s, when she moved to the Washington area, Hiro returned to the heartfelt and painful subject of her high school valedictorian address, Executive Order 9066.  Like Okubo, but not herself interned, she began a series of paintings she called "Kimono and Barbed Wire."  For me at the time, who knew so little about the Japanese Internment Camps, the art was both incredible and sad. There was the softness, delicacy and beauty of the kimono and the prejudice, injustice, and harsh reality of the illegal incarceration of American citizens of Japanese descent. It moved me, powerfully, at the time, to view art as a medium for the expression of social inustice and the hope for healing and change.   

Hiro, Incarceration, "Kimono and Barbed Wire" series

"Breaking Free"

This first exhibitions of “Kimono & Barbed Wire”  was a four-year (1993-1997) national museum tour, titled, “STRENGTH & DIVERSITY: Japanese American Woman 1885-1990,” with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, together with performance art program by HIRO. She was especially pleased that the series was featured at the 2010 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where she  painted a  24-foot "Kimono & Barbed Wire” mural in live performance.  She called it a "tour de force." 

With the ugliness of Asian-American prejudice rearing its ugly head, Hiro's point of view and her multi-cultural art are needed now more than ever.  "Through the culture of art,"  Hiro said at a talk at the Department of Justice, "we continue to extend our hands to all people in a circle of friendship."   

Main source: Hiro's autobiographical description of her life and work in  http://www.hiro-artist.com/