Mizue Sawano

Mizue Sawano (b. 1941, Moriguchi, Osaka Prefecture), the daughter of a well-known novelist and journalist, is a Japanese American painter whose studio practice spans over five decades, traversing Tokyo, Paris, and New York. Sawano's work explores the poetics of the natural world through a contemporary lens, often engaging with natural motifs primarily in oil paint.

Trained in both Japanese and Western art traditions, Sawano earned her BFA and MFA from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music before receiving a French government scholarship in 1966 to study under Maurice Brianchon at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She relocated to New York in 1969, where she continued her studies at the Art Students League under a Merit Scholarship and established a long-term studio practice. Through her extensive studio practice, Alexandra Munroe, curator and Asia scholar, observes that Sawano “focused on figures and landscapes in an increasingly free and fluid manner, moving farther yet from realist towards abstract forms”.

Sawano has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Japan, and internationally, including presentations in Tokyo, Washington, D.C., Mexico City, and Morocco. Her work is held in both public and private collections. Sawano has exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as well as many others. She has also completed major public commissions in Morocco through the Assilah Forum Foundation. Over the years, Sawano has been recognized for her contribution to cross-cultural artistic dialogue, particularly between the U.S. and Japan, and is a recipient of multiple honors, including “Artist of the Year” at the 1974 Mitsukoshi Emerging Artists Exhibition in Tokyo.