Miya Ando is a New York-based artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and artist books. Her work constructs visual systems that translate temporal natural phenomena into material form, often marking impermanence through elemental processes. She engages materials such as indigo, silver, anodized aluminum, and washi, each chosen for its capacity to register durational change. Drawing from both Japanese and American lineages, as well as early years spent in a Buddhist temple in Japan and an apprenticeship with a master metalsmith in Okayama, she translates natural and linguistic ephemera into form. Titles often draw from untranslatable Japanese idioms tied to seasonal and ecological transitions, positioning language as a structural element within the work.
Ando’s solo exhibitions include the Noguchi Museum in New York, Asia Society Texas Center in Houston, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, and the American University Museum in Washington DC. Group exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Renwick Gallery), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the 56th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Grimani in Venice. Her work is held in major public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Corning Museum of Glass, Crystal Bridges, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Jean Paul Najar Foundation.
Her public commissions include a thirty-foot September 11 memorial sculpture at the Zaha Hadid Aquatic Centre in London and the Flower Atlas Calendar installation at Brookfield Place in New York. She has received awards including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Emerging Artist Prize from the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship.She is a sixteenth generation descendant of Bizen swordsmiths.