Martha Braun recalls knowing Munio Makuuchi over 50 years ago and, ever since then, living with his print “Grandma T (Kikue Takahashi).” Now an artist working from her studio in the Leverett Crafts and Arts Center, Braun met Makuuchi when both were students at the University of Iowa in the mid-1960s.
“There was a group of four or five of us who came together and hung out, all outliers,” she says. She was taking photography classes; others were printmakers. “We all had a good time with each other and connected, talking about each other’s art.” She remembers that Munio Makuuchi presented two distinct sides, confirming family members’ accounts of his mercurial personality. “He could be very crotchety, and he could be very gentle. These different aspects were so dramatically opposed.”
Braun first saw the print in the summer of 1963 or 1964 (her copy is dated 1963). The large etching depicts Makuuchi’s paternal grandmother, who took care of him when he was a young child at the Minidoka Relocation Camp during World War II, while his parents were assigned to labor duties outside the camp.
“Two things made it compelling to me way back when,” she recalls. First, the reel on the Grandmother’s fishing rod is rendered as a snail shell. “The metaphorical aspect of that detail really caught me,” she admits. “But then,” she smiles, “the image of his grandmother showed great resemblance to my mother. I bought the print to give to her.”
Braun’s mother promptly framed the print and proudly hung it on prominent display at home. “After my mother left her house, I kept the print because it was a fine piece of art and because, with the passage of time, instead of looking like my mother, the image now looks like me. Not an exact portrait, but some general resemblance.”
In his artwork, Makuuchi often employed the symbolism of fish and explored issues of identity and intergenerational family connections. So even though “Grandma T” dates from his days as a graduate student, it reveals elements that engaged him throughout his entire career. And he probably would have been delighted with Braun’s sense of her own family emerging in response to his portrait of his grandmother.