Street Artist Jimmy Mirikitani Rises from Art History’s Margins
After decades on the margins of art history, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani—a collagist of singular, inimitable vision—is finally having his story told, though not in any linear fashion. The late artist is currently the subject of a solo exhibition on view through June at the Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas City—among the first serious institutional examinations of his practice. Co-curators Maki Kaneko and Kris Imants Ercums have organized the exhibition thematically rather than chronologically, echoing Mirikitani’s collage-like life: an accumulation of pivotal events in which the past continually presses upon the present, from the atomic bombing of his hometown, Hiroshima, to his incarceration at Tule Lake following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and finally to his arrival in mid-1950s New York, on the cusp of a changing art world; multiculturalism was gaining currency and street art would soon enter the city’s galleries. Related Articles For much of her curatorial career, Kaneko has focused on researching art made during World War II, with an eye toward Japanese artists. “But Jimmy’s art told me something I had never heard,” she said. “The way he narrated his …
