The Goddess of Good Fortune did not smile on printmaker and poet Munio Makuuchi (1934-2000). Nor did the Good Fairy of Fame and Fortune cast any sparking stardust his way. Instead, his life was troubled and tumultuous, his artwork was formed by contradiction and framed in paradox, and his reputation fell under the radar of the art world. “Defiant Vision: Prints & Poetry” by Munio Makuuchi, at the Smith College Museum of Art, is the first museum exhibition that focuses his work and reveals the strength, range and depth of human drama in more than 50 prints and poems.
A painter who worked mainly in printmaking, Makuuchi was a highly educated, technically skilled visual artist who was also an intuitive, self-taught poet. An artist who continually probed imagery of intergenerational family history, he was a loner much of his life. And a Japanese-American who mined his dual identity, he forged a distinctive, defining artistic style while teaching in Nigeria. Often at odds with the world around him and with himself, he even had two names. Born as Howard Takahashi, in his early adulthood he claimed his middle name and his mother’s maiden name to become Munio Makuuchi — perhaps rejecting his father and family expectations while retaining his family connections.
The divergent strands of his convoluted biography swirl around two pivotal points. As a child, from age 7 to 11, Makuuchi was incarcerated with his family at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, re-defined and re-branded, with thousands of Japanese-Americans, as potential spies and saboteurs during World War II. Calling himself a “child P.O.W.,” he continually revisited this painful experience, even as it catalyzed some of his most powerful work. And as a young man drafted into the U.S. army, he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 1957, which had a lasting impact on his personality and his practice of art.
The phrase “It’s complicated” doesn’t even begin to cover Makuuchi’s career. But who he was is intimately tied to the figurative imagery of his prints and the deftly compressed scenarios of his poetry. So to understand Munio Makuuchi, maybe it’s best to look at one of his seminal works. “On Boy’s Day I ‘I.D.’ with Rocky Mountain Salmon../…So where’s the Salmon?” symbolizes his life, spills into his poetry, and served as the spark for the museum exhibition.
“On Boy’s Day…” is a drypoint print, in which Makuuchi scratched his design directly into a copper plate with steel-tipped tools, applied ink into the grooves, and then ran the inked plate through a press. Makuuchi favored drypoint technique throughout his career and was vigorously hands-on as he gouged the metal surface. As a result, the lines of his black-and-white prints spring to life with richly variegated textures.
In its symbolic imagery and narrative title, “On Boy’s Day…” reveals Makuuchi’s dual identity as Japanese American. The title references the Japanese festival of “Boy’s Day,” in which families fly paper flags shaped like carp to celebrate a son’s growth and good health. To this expression of Japanese tradition, Makuuchi adds the image of a salmon, a fish native to the Northwest coast (which he felt was his true home) that carried particular personal meaning for him with its life cycle of migration and return. In the background loom two iconic mountains from two different worlds: Mt. Rainier, outside Seattle, and Mount Fuji, in Japan. The landscape leading towards the foreground depicts rolling hills in the form of interlocking fish, like huge sardines wedged head-to-tail. And below the flying paper carp, another series of fish-like shapes and shadows dissolve into water, becoming increasingly insubstantial.
Makuuchi continually grappled with intermingled issues of identity, family, belonging, and displacement in both art and life. And he frequently engaged with the symbolism of animal forms, especially fish. This is seen in a portrait of his grandmother with a fish, dating back to his early days studying printmaking at the University of Iowa. It appears in mid-career work like “Fairgrounds Called Camp Harmony,” where humans (perhaps his mother and sister) merge with animal forms, in reference to the euphemistically named relocation camp where his family lived in former stables. And it emerges in the very last print he made, Moon Catchers, based on a wedding photograph of his daughter-in-law Constance — with a fish.
Towards the end of his life, Makuuchi, like the migratory salmon he saw as a personal symbol, found his way home. He lived with his mother’s sister in Seattle, and periodically returned to Madison, Wisconsin, to print works at the studio of his friend Andrew Balkin. His connection to his son, Jamie, grew stronger and seemed to bring him great joy as well as establish some anchoring stability. A photograph in the exhibition catalogue shows a beaming Makuuchi cradling his infant granddaughter, Kolby. Perhaps even more significantly, he staked full claim to family when he added “Grandpa” to his signature below a print — “Ma Pa & Pod Protection Agencies” — depicting a pod of whales protecting a calf.
Despite his consistently distinguished work, why does Makuuchi remain unrecognized? Exhibition co-curators Aprile Gallant and Floyd Cheung note several contributing factors: racism due to his ethnic heritage; his choice to make black-and-white figurative prints in an era favoring colorful abstraction; his refusal to produce standard printmaking editions; his erratic employment; his turn to poetry; and his invention and practice of “aerogami,” an air-born variation of the traditional Japanese paper-folding art of origami. The current display of his work offers no easy answers to the complex question of Makuuchi’s relative obscurity, but it does help bring his defiant vision further to light — and fully to life.
Defiant Vision: Prints & Poetry by Munio Makuuchi, at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, through December 8, 2019.