Talks + Panels
Masako Miki Artist Talk
November 13, 2025, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Join us for a conversation between exhibiting artist Masako Miki and ICA SF Founding Director Ali Gass during the last month of Midnight March, Miki’s most ambitious solo exhibition yet. This fully site-responsive show brings together newly commissioned work and felted character sculptures in a darkened environment of indigo walls and gold stars, inviting us all to march alongside Miki’s colorful parade of outcasts.
Together, Miki and Gass will explore how the artist’s materials and mythologies have evolved, tracing the conceptual development of the exhibition and the curatorial choices that shaped its design.
Get firsthand insight into the nuances of Midnight March and hear directly from the voices who brought it to life.
5:30pm: Doors open, refreshments
6:00pm: Conversation begins
Masako Miki: Midnight March closes to the public Sunday, December 7th.
Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman. Photo: Francis Baker.
Photo: Ulysses Ortega for the NYT.
Visitors in Masako Miki: Midnight March. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno.
Masako Miki (b. 1973, Osaka, Japan) is an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations blur the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Using a variety of materials, including wool, wood, bronze, ink, and watercolor, Miki creates characterful artworks rooted in the Indigenous culture of her Japanese birthplace but informed by the freedom and ambition of three decades of living in California. As Miki explains, “I hope that my works generate the kind of curiosity and empathy that enables us to come together.”
Miki has enjoyed solo shows and projects at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA; ICA San José, CA; and KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY. She opened a two-person exhibition titled (Super)Natural: Paul Klee and Masako Miki at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on August 17, 2024. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; BAMPFA; the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, CA; Collección SOLO, Madrid; and Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, New York, among others. Recent commissions include a site-specific installation for the Minna Natoma Arts Corridor in San Francisco and a permanent installation of bronze sculptures at Uber HQ, San Francisco. Miki has a BFA from Notre Dame de Namur University and an MFA from San José State University, CA. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Miki is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Ryan Lee, New York.
Related Exhibition
