Miki McCrossen Hayakawa

Miki McCrossen Hayakawa (1899–1953) is an important California artist. In the years leading to WWII, Hayakawa was an artist of who had to endure the discrimination that faced many of those Californians of Japanese-descent iving in California. Still, she became part of a vibrant and diverse art scene that emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area between the World Wars.

Hayakawa  attended at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco 1920s, where she studied oil painting. Here she met two other artists,  Hisako Hibi (1907–1991), and Miné Okubo (1912–2001).  Okubo had moved from Southern California to Berkeley in the 1930s after completing her BA and MA in art.

Hakakawa was a skilled artist, whose modernist depictions of life in California are invaluable to the story of twentieth-century American art history in California -- has been largely unrecognized. Recently an exhibition entitled, "Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo" was on display at the Smithsonian. This exhibition helps assert these artist's place in the story of American modernism and present paintings from each artists --  and life stories for the first time.