Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani’s Collages Get a Long-Overdue Museum Reading
At the Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas City, a new solo exhibition is reframing the life and work of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, the Japanese American collagist who spent decades on the margins of art history. On view through June, the exhibition is among the first serious institutional examinations of an artist whose biography was as layered as his work.
Rather than tracing his life in strict sequence, curators Maki Kaneko and Kris Imants Ercums have built the show thematically. That choice mirrors Mirikitani’s own practice, in which memory, war, displacement, and self-fashioning were never separate subjects. Born in Hiroshima, he was later incarcerated at Tule Lake after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, then arrived in New York in the mid-1950s, just as the city’s art world was beginning to shift around multiculturalism and the rise of street art.
For Kaneko, the project grew out of years of research into art made during World War II, especially by Japanese artists. Mirikitani, she said, offered a story she had not encountered before. Ercums described collage as the organizing principle of the exhibition, noting that it also shaped the way Mirikitani constructed his own biography through found documents and art.
That biography was lived in public. Between the late 1980s and 2001, Mirikitani worked in Washington Square Park and other spaces in Lower Manhattan, where he drew koi fish and cats for passersby before revealing the more searching collages beneath. Those works combined political photography, diary, and drawing to address Imperial Japan’s demise, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Tule Lake incarceration camp, and his renunciation of U.S. citizenship.
The exhibition also complicates the familiar outsider-art narrative. Mirikitani was not simply self-taught in the romantic sense often attached to artists working outside institutions. The show points to his study in Tokyo under Nihonga painters Kawai Gyokudō and Kimura Buzan, and to the “education papers” he carried and presented when asked about himself. His work has since entered the collections of the Smithsonian and the American Folk Art Museum.
Mirikitani died in 2012, but the museum’s presentation suggests that his place in art history is still being written. Linda Hattendorf’s 2006 documentary The Cats of Mirikitani helped bring his story to wider attention; the exhibition asks viewers to look again, and more closely, at the artist behind the myth.
