Yoshida Chizuko (Japanese, 1924–2017), Vallery of Butterflies, 1979, color woodblock print on paper, image: 22 in x 30 3/4 in; sheet: 25 in x 33 3/4 in, Courtesy of Yoshida Ayomi. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
March 5, 2025 (Portland, OR)—Portland Art Museum (PAM) announced today that it will present the first major retrospective to focus on the groundbreaking 20th-century painter and printmaker Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017), a pioneering woman modernist in Japan.
Opening September 27, 2025, Yoshida Chizuko features approximately 100 works, many of which have never previously been exhibited, encompassing early paintings and sketches, rare monotypes, woodblock prints, and zinc-plate mixed media prints, in addition to archival material and ephemera.
Nearly 80 of the works in the exhibition comprise a major planned acquisition from the Yoshida family estate, joining the Museum’s exceptional holdings of 20th-century Japanese prints that are among the most significant in the country.
The exhibition with be on view at the Portland Art Museum through January 4, 2026.
Yoshida Chizuko traces the evolution of the artist’s full career, from avant-garde abstraction in the late 1940s and 1950s to neon-colored Op art and works which drew inspiration from commercial advertising in the 1960s and 1970s, to her late career, which was heavily influenced by the natural world.
The exhibition situates her within the context of international modernist art and 20th-century Japanese printmaking, a medium that experienced enormous global popularity and commercial success in the postwar era.
The presentation also explores the tensions inherent in Chizuko’s role as a woman artist in mid-century Japan and as a member of the well-known Yoshida family into which she married, with a tradition of artistry spanning four generations into the present day.
Works on view illustrate the personal influences that shaped Chizuko’s work, including the loss of a beloved brother, formative years as a member of the artist Okamoto Tarō’s radical Night Society collective, and the later interplay between Chizuko’s work and that of her husband, Hodaka.
Yoshida Chizuko is organized and curated by Jeannie Kenmotsu, Ph.D., the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, grant MA-256007-OMS-24.
