Artists | MAKI Gallery | MAKI

Born in 1973, in Los Angeles, California, Miya Ando uses a variety of materials including steel, aluminum, and wood to create abstract paintings, sculptures, and installations. Ando skillfully fuses the traditional and the contemporary, the industrial and the natural, East and West, reflecting the essence of nature in her work with refinement and sensitivity.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Mugetsu (Invisible Moon), MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2021); Kuu / 空, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2020); Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form, Asia Society Texas Center (Houston, 2019); Clouds, Kantor Gallery (Los Angeles, 2019); and Clouds, The Noguchi Museum (New York, 2018). Ando has also participated in various group exhibitions including at the Haus der Kunst (Munich, 2019) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, Los Angeles, 2017). In 2015, her large-scale installation, Emptiness The Sky (Shou Sugi Ban), was shown at the Frontiers Reimagined exhibition, an official collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale. Ando’s work is included in the public collections of LACMA; The Nassau County Museum; The Corning Museum of Glass; The Detroit Institute of Arts; Luftmuseum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Museum of Art and History; among other public institutions as well as in numerous private collections. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel installed in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.