Talk:Michio Ihara

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 21:31, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Michio Ihara. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060103045322/http://www.decordova.org/decordova/sculp_park/ihara.html to http://www.decordova.org/decordova/sculp_park/ihara.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 13:30, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Michio Ihara

Michio Ihara, an artist who devoted most of his career designing large scale sculptures for architectural spaces, was born in Paris on November 17, 1928. His father Usaburo, an artist and life-long admirer of everything French, was studying painting. His mother Shigeko was studying classical piano with Marguerite Long. They were members of an expatriate Japanese community of artists, writers and musicians.

The family returned to Tokyo in 1929 where Usaburo built a house and studio. He was well known in Japan as a portraitist, educator, and one of the founders of the Japanese Artists Association, a cooperative that assisted its member painters, print-makers and sculptors with national health care, legal advice and other social services.

Like many school children during the war years, Mr. Ihara was sent to the country side to assist farmers, to downtown Tokyo to salvage materials after bombings, and to work in a factory producing of airplane parts.

Soon after the war, his parents separated. His mother became a novelist and journalist, taking the pen name Yuki Shigeko. She became well known when her first novel won the prestigious Akutagawa award for the best work of fiction by a promising new writer.

Mr. Ihara studied oil painting at Tokyo University of Fine Arts, graduating in 1953. Between then and 1961 he turned to works on paper in ink and gouache and participated in group and one-man exhibitions. He also collaborated with architects, translating his work on paper into inlaid marble murals.

His interest in art for architecture was inspired by the writings of Gyorgy Kepes and in 1961 he received a Fulbright Foundation grant to study with Kepes as a special graduate student in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1962 he became a Research Assiciate in the Department, rented studio space in Cambridge, and began to work in metal--particularly copper squares, which he "painted" with heat and flux, producing a series of wall reliefs. He referred to this work as his period of two and one half dimensions. A fellow artist said he was the "Vivaldi of metal."

Before returning to Japan in 1964, he had a one-man exhibition at the Kanegis Gallery in Boston and completed his first architectural commission in America.This particular work was a favorite of Mr. Ihara because the architects brought him on board very early in the design process, allowing his wall relief to be truly integrated into the building.

Back in Japan, he collaborated with architects, creating sculptures for corporate offices, a university, a theater, a church and a Buddhist temple. He also created "Wind, Wind, Wind" the first of his kinetic sculptures.

In 1969 through 1970 he participated in an International Sculptors Symposium that brought sculptors from the United States and Europe to create sculptures for Expo'70. It was here that he first met George Rickey, Kenneth Snelson, Edwardo Paolozzi and Phillip King among others.

Besides the 100 foot-long stainless steel sculpture produced for the Symposium, Mr, Ihara also created a sculpture for Monday Plaza (one of seven plaza sculptures at EXPO), as well as a suspended sculpture for the Christian Pavilion.

His friendship with George Rickey continued after Mr. Ihara returned to the United States in 1970, when he was invited to become a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Mr. Rickey introduced him to George Staempfli and the Staempfli Gallery represented Mr. Ihara until the gallery closed in 1988.Mr. Ihara had one-man exhibitions there in 1977, 1980, and 1984. Mr. Staempfli wrote that "Michio Ihara works with stainless steel, with brass and copper, but mainly he works with space."

In 1974, Mr. Ihara decided to live and work in the United States. His search for his ideal living and working space ended in 1981 when he was shown a property in Concord, Massachusetts--a Victorian house in disrepair that had been the administration building of a private school with an attached gymnasium/classroom building designed by Carl Koch. Mr. Ihara walked into the gymnasium and told his wife, "This is it." He worked in that studio for over thirty years, producing sculptures for buildings in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Some of the architects he collaborated with were Kenzo Tange, John Portman, Akira Inadomi, Jung/Brannen Associates,Yoshiro Taniguchi, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Yoshinobu Ashihara, RTKL Inc., and Minoru Takeyama.

Unfortunately and to Mr. Ihara's great disappointment, many of his sculptures have ceased to exist. His twenty-seven story high suspended sculpture in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans was severely damaged in Hurricane Katrina. Some of the buildings for which he created sculptures were razed and replaced with newer structures, including Burden Hall at Harvard Business School, and his first commission in the United States.

Many of his works remain-- among them his ten-part wall reliefs at Rockefeller Center in New York City, commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1978, his kinetic sculpture opposite City Hall in Boston, another kinetic sculpture at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Mr. Ihara died at his home in Canton, Massachusetts on June 1, 2025. He was 96.

D. Dominick Lombardi wrote the following about Mr. Ihara's work in the Huffington Post in 2017: "You may not know the name Michio Ihara, yet there is a chance you have seen one of his striking site-specific sculptures installed in a variety of public spaces...They are often peaceful, thoughtful and always graceful yet there is a level of engagement that stimulates and uplifts the mind and spirit of the viewer." Doreen Ihara (talk) 21:16, 15 May 2026 (UTC)