CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/20/2026

Illuminating ‘Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts’ is Back in Stock from Pre-Echo Press!

We see so many excellent books here. Every season, twice per year, more than 500. And yet, even after three-and-a-half decades in business, bringing in books from all around the world—from big publishers and small—this one stands out. Weighing in at 460 pages with a two-inch spine, this book captures that most special and difficult-to-capture quality of discovery. The subject of this book, first published in 2024, and quickly sold out, is the Japanese American artist Miyoko Ito, prolific but underrecognized in her lifetime, but rising now—forty-three years after her death at age 65. “This is the first book dedicated to the life and work of artist Miyoko Ito (1918–1983),” Jordan Stein writes, “an artist of uncommonly mysterious and exquisite vision. While hardly unknown during her lifetime—her work sold briskly in her adopted hometown of Chicago—she endured for decades the fate of the artist’s artist: revered by fellow travelers but kept quiet, like a secret. She was understood beyond the Midwest–if she was understood at all—as a regional artist, that most disparaging and unreasonable of categories. In recent years, as a more expanded view of art history has taken hold, there has been increasing critical acclaim for her paintings, and an ever-growing band of admiring artists, curators and collectors. Regardless of her relatively limited reputation, she was intensely, even desperately, devoted to her practice. ‘I have no place to take myself except painting,’ she confided in a 1978 interview, bringing to mind an image of Ito—her long dark hair twisted into rolls—crossing a threshold into Painting as one might enter a foreign country, or a new dimension. As she said, ‘It has been my biggest life-giving force.’ Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts is a long-overdue window into that unique force.”