From the Artist

Berkeley Hills II, which includes photos of my mother at age 16 and at 79, and pictures of me and my two grown daughters, is not only a reflection of contemporary times, but also one about women and choices. My daughter Naomi is an opera singer living in London and her sister, Sarah, is a writer who is an associate editor at a leading magazine in New York.
—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records

As a printmaker and painter, my work has always drawn from my observations of nature. I eschewed any outwardly depictive imagery because I was convinced that the abstracted form was more truly “real.” However, when I began to work on the computer, I found that certain depictive images haunted me. My father, who died in 1950, was a documenter. He kept photo albums with pithy statements penciled under the pictures. He was also an amateur photographer, his pictures and the photographs of him chronicle a time in American history—WWII–that I felt was important to the formation of my own identity as a Japanese American. This period was also of extreme importance to my father’s experience of being American. The ability of the computer to combine and resize images inspired me to make a series of works dealing with my family and its history.

The way I work, using both my hand and gesture as well as the technology of the computer, is very much an expression of my interest in duality. We, as humans, are both blessed and cursed by our intelligence; the computer is a revolutionary tool invented and engineered by humans, which provides us with another way of using our faculties of hand, memory, and imagination.
_{—Excerpted from https://www.michi-itami.com/selected-essays, accessed 6-24-2021}