Unforgotten New York Stories: Japanese and Japanese Americans in the 1940s (UPCOMING in March 2025)
Japanese American sculptor Leo Amino (1911-1989) is the first American artist to use plastics as a principal material of sculptural composition, and the innovator of cast plastics in American sculpture. The only Asian American artist to teach on faculty in the history of the Summer Art Sessions at Black Mountain College, he is also one of few artists of Asian descent to gain this level of national exposure in the first half of the 20th century. First invited to teach at the college by Josef Albers in 1946, a year after the artist began his experiments with polyester resin following its military declassification at the close of WWII, Amino is the only sculptor of his generation to dedicate himself to an investigation of phenomenal transparency following the experiments in the new medium by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo. Joining artists Noguchi, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others in denouncing fascism in Japan while attempting to carve out a space for their work on the East Coast of the United States during the era of Japanese American incarceration, Amino’s oeuvre chronicles a submerged history of sculptural experiment during the era Irving Sandler notoriously identified with the “triumph of American painting.”
Born in Taiwan and educated in Tokyo, Amino immigrated to the West Coast as a young man in 1929, where he attended San Mateo Junior College before anti-Japanese sentiment moved him to cross the country to New York in 1935. During the second Sino-Japanese and World Wars, he found himself an outsider to both Japanese and American nationalisms, signing an anti-fascist declaration by Japanese American artists in New York City in 1941, and ultimately resolving never to return to Japan. During the decade and a half following his invitation to teach at Black Mountain College, Amino is featured alongside his fellow “darlings” of the Whitney Annual Exhibitions for sculpture Alexander Calder, David Smith and Isamu Noguchi nearly every year, appearing in all but two iterations of the exhibition from 1947 to 1962. Joining at first this mid-century avant-garde’s movement toward the articulation and dematerialization of space through open work construction in materials such as wood and wire, the artist’s unprecedented experiments in cast plastics emerged in the 1940s from dissatisfaction with his attempts to incorporate color into traditional sculptural media. As faculty for the Summer Sessions for the Arts at Black Mountain College in 1946 and 1950, Amino’s work and teaching informed the education of students including sculptor Ruth Asawa, painter Kenneth Noland, and architect Harry Seidler. In 1952 Josef Albers recommended Amino for a position at Cooper Union, where he taught for twenty-five years, introducing artists such as Jack Whitten to sculpture.
Beginning in the early 1940s, Amino’s experiments in new media emerged from his dissatisfaction with painting on the sculptured surface, developing eventually into a mode of empirical, dialogic, and sensuous inquiry resonating with what Anni Albers described as “work with material.” Virtually self-taught, Amino drew on three months training in direct carve technique at Greenwich Village’s American Artists School in order to begin this material investigation through the study of form latent in wood grain. By the time he receives Josef Albers’s invitation to join the faculty of the 1946 Summer Arts Session at Black Mountain, his compositions in wood, hydrostone and magnesite have given way to castings in the newly declassified industrial material of polyester resin: he proposes to Albers a course in “experimental work in new materials for sculpture.” Having envisioned as early as 1949 a mode of sculpture for which the principal means of composition would be light and color, the artist did not begin until 1965 what he considered to be the culmination of his experiments, with the initiation of the Refractional series he will pursue until his passing in 1989. Making the decision to abandon many of his previous avenues of investigation in order to dedicate himself exclusively to the medium he had introduced into the history of American sculpture two decades earlier, cast polyester resin, Amino will pursue this body of work in which rhythmic progression and economy of form structure the elaboration of a chromatic inquiry into the sensible.
