Miki Hayakawa

Miki Hayakawa (June 7, 1899-March 6, 1952) was a Japanese-American painter and printmaker.

She was a portraitist and landscape artist working and exhibiting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work is associated with the American modernist movement, often featuring bright colors and looser brushstrokes.

Early life
Hayakawa was born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1899 and immigrated to Oakland, California with her mother in 1908. Her father, a pastor, had arrived the year before.

Work
In the 1920s, Hayakawa trained at the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts and at the California School of Fine Arts.

in San Francisco where she adopted a cubist style and a modernist sensibility about color.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she exhibited her work at local institutions such as Los Angeles Museum (1927, 1936), the San Francisco Museum of Art (1935), the Foundation of Western Art, Los Angeles (1937), and the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939).

While Hayakawa's parents were incarcerated at a number of internment camps during World War II, there are no records of her having been incarcerated in a War Relocation Authority or Department of Justice camp. She is believed to have moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico around 1942. She worked and exhibited in Santa Fe, adopting elements from her new environment into her portraits and landscapes, until her death from cancer in 1953.

Collections

 * Los Angeles County Museum of Art
 * New Mexico Museum of Art
 * Monterey Museum of Art

Personal life
Hayakawa married artist Preston McCrossen in 1947.