Artists | MAKI Gallery | MAKI

Born in 1973 in Los Angeles, Miya Ando uses a wide variety of materials such as steel, wood, glass, aluminum, and paper to create paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations. Ando skillfully fuses the traditional and the contemporary, the industrial and the organic, and East and West in her work, capturing the ephemerality of nature through a refined aesthetic sensibility.
The artist’s recent solo exhibitions include Vespertine Clouds (Yūgumo), Sundaram Tagore Gallery (Singapore, 2024); Sky Atlas, Wilding Cran Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023); Waiting for the Moon, Bolinas Museum (Bolinas, CA, 2023) and Nancy Toomey Fine Art (San Francisco, 2023); Kumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed By Birds And The Moon), Kavi Gupta (Chicago, 2022); Aki Wa Yuugure (In Autumn, The Evening), Sundaram Tagore Gallery (New York, 2022); Mugetsu (Invisible Moon), MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2021); and Clouds, The Noguchi Museum (New York, 2018). Ando also actively participates in group exhibitions at prominent institutions like the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C., 2021); the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR, 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 Frontiers Reimagined, an official collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale. Ando’s work is included in the collections of many renowned public institutions, such as LACMA, Detroit Institute of Arts, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Haus der Kunst, as well as various private collections. The artist 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 steel salvaged from the World Trade Center for 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 holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She continued her graduate research in East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and later apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.