The first monograph to be published featuring the work of the Japanese American artist, Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible introduces a vital revision into both the canon of 20th-century avant-garde sculpture and the history of Asian American art.
The volume is published in association with the first significant museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s work since 1985, Leo Amino: Work with Material at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and shares a title with the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 1973, held at David Zwirner Gallery in 2020. Edited and written by the artist's grandchild, poet and curator Genji Amino, the book includes additional texts by a selection of writers, poets and scholars including Aruna D'Souza, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy Lippard, Susette Min, Neferti Tadiar, Mary Whitten, Ronaldo Wilson and Karen Yamashita. Richly illustrated with images from the BMC Museum and Zwirner exhibitions, the volume includes an extended chronology featuring never-before-seen archival images and ephemera from across the artist’s career.

Born in Taiwan under the auspices of Japanese colonial rule and educated in Tokyo, Leo Amino (1911–89) immigrated to the West Coast as a young man in 1929, where he attended San Mateo Junior College before anti-Japanese sentiment moved him to cross the country to New York in 1935. During the second Sino-Japanese and World Wars, he found himself an outsider to both Japanese and American nationalisms, signing an anti-fascist declaration by Japanese American artists in New York City in 1941, and ultimately resolving never to return to Japan. Rather than approaching the New York School of painters and sculptors who came to represent Abstract Expressionism as an exceptionally American phenomenon, Amino embraced a community of outsiders, finding a measure of freedom among the exiles and refugees of Black Mountain only two years after the college’s integration. Joining Noguchi, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others in denouncing fascism in Japan while attempting to carve out a space for their work on the East Coast of the United States during the era of Japanese American incarceration, he is one of few artists of Asian descent in the first half of the 20th century to have figured so prominently in the art historical record.



Leo Amino
Radius Books / Black Mountain College
Hardcover, 220 pages
ISBN 9781955161053