Take the mystery out of art history
 
Margaret Yuko Kimura - "Raindrops"
 
 
 

Margaret Yuko Kimura • American (B: 1968)

Raindrops C: 2019 • Etching and monotype on handmade kobo (mulberry) paper

Yuko Kimura stands on the shoulders of two women. Her grandmother, Tei, gave her a family history and a pile of her old sewing patterns. Her mother, Tomoko, gave her Cleveland. 

Tei’s life was different than she must have imagined when she first left her country home in northern Japan for city life in cosmopolitan, pre-war Tokyo. After the war there were searing scars in everything. With money tight, she began sewing clothes for her family. Bits of old kimonos and fabric were always scattered across the wooden floors of her city flat. Her tall athletic body bent while carefully measuring every family member from husband to child leaving hand drawn patterns neatly piled on the table. 

And so Tei made new clothes from old scraps of fabric. A new life in a city sweeping away war memories. A new family complete with a talented daughter, Tomoko, who earned a scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art, a welcome escape from the poverty of post-war Japan.

In Cleveland, Tomoko found two people important to her future. Toshiko Takaezu and Nobuyuki Kimura. Takaezu became her artistic mentor. Kimura became her husband.

Daughter, Yuko, soon joined the family. After a brief stay in San Francisco, the Kimuras returned to Japan where Mr. Kimura worked for a company selling merchandise featuring the popular Peanuts cartoon characters drawn by Charles Schulz. 

Growing up in Japan, young Yuko listened to her mother’s stories of far away Cleveland and the way Toshiko Takaezu cooked for her students. She marveled at the art in children’s books, especially those by Mitsumasa Anno, and eventually decided to become an artist, herself. When the time came, Yuko found herself at the Cleveland Institute of Art retracing many of her mother’s old steps and making them her own. Something new from something old.

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Yuko’s grandmother Tei, affectionately known as Baba, taught her to never throw things away. Not to hoard, but to save things that might prove useful in the future. Scraps of fabric. Bits of paper. Old ceramics. Memories. 

Yuko took her Baba’s old sewing patterns and began weaving them into her art. Her stitches weren’t as tight as her grandmothers, but just as loving. She took materials filled with memories of other people’s lives and reorganized them into her new art, always searching for ways to turn complexity into simplicity. She found the process meditative. A way to connect her life to those who came before her. Their memories became hers. The imperfections of the materials they left behind lit her way forward.

And, so the Japanese daughter of an artist, granddaughter of a seamstress, often sits In the quiet of an old Cleveland factory and makes her art from scraps her ancestors left behind. Everything old becomes new again and imperfect things become beautiful in the hands of an artist. Wabi-sabi.

Canton Museum of Art Permanent Collection • Purchased by the museum • 2020.11

 
 

4 Ways to Sound Smart When Viewing at The Canton Museum of Art

1.
“She studied at the Cleveland Museum of Art, just like her mother many years before. Tokyo’s loss was Cleveland’s gain.”

2.
“Many of her works are made from old dress forms her grandmother used to clothe her family after the war. It’s a very artistic form of generational hand-me-downs.”

3.
”Although she was born in Oakland, California, her family moved back to Japan when she was very young. I guess you can take the girl out of America, but you can’t take America out of the girl.”

4.
“While a young girl she fell in love with art because of the illustrations she saw in children’s books. Those by Massamo Anno were her favorite.”

 
 

Kimura Timeline. Scroll over images to see timeline.