New Collections: Tadaaki Kuwayama Papers and Rakuko Naito Papers

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2025 issue (vol. 64, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current. 

Upon immigrating to New York from Japan in 1958, the artists Tadaaki Kuwayama (1932–2023) and Rakuko Naito (b. 1935) sought to shift their practice away from the nihonga style of painting, which embraced Japanese artistic traditions. They were drawn to the aesthetics of minimalism in the United States associated with artists such as Joseph Albers and Frank Stella. The papers of Kuwayama and Naito document the married couple’s central position in New York’s midcentury art world. 

In the Kuwayama Papers, researchers will find correspondence, photographs, and other materials that document the artist’s emerging career in the US. Among the earliest materials in the collection are illustrations Kuwayama created for a September 1959 Life Magazine article on haiku poetry, in which he painted roosters in the nihonga tradition to correspond with the visual metaphors of a published poem. Despite his desire to depart from his traditional artistic training, Kuwayama accepted the commission as one of his first jobs after relocating to the US. The collection also includes exhibition records from the Green Gallery in New York, where Kuwayama received early representation; this material includes an invitation to the preview of a group show featuring John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, and Kuwayama. Letters between Kuwayama and Henrietta Ehrsam, founder and owner of the Henri Gallery in Washington DC, speak to Kuwayama and Naito’s complex relationship with Ehrsam, who represented both artists beginning in 1966. (The Archives also holds the Henri Gallery Records.) In 1978, Kuwayama and Naito separated from the Henri Gallery after a legal dispute over unpaid art sales.

As a mid-career and established artist, Kuwayama experienced more visibility in galleries and art fairs across Europe and Asia. His papers include correspondence, inventory lists, sales records, and exhibition materials detailing his representation in galleries such as Whitestone Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan; Galerie Reckermann in Cologne, Germany; and Gallery Yamaguchi in Osaka, Japan. Kuwayama was also represented by Galerie Renate Bender, an art gallery based in Germany specializing in minimalism. In a 1994 letter, the eponymous gallery owner expressed his appreciation of Kuwayama for building community through his abstract art. Bender describes such an interaction with a couple who purchased work by Kuwayama at a Frankfurt art fair. “Thank you[,] Tadaaki[,] for giving me via your work the chance to meet these extraordinary people,” she wrote. “I believe we will soon meet again, we found so many common thoughts!”

Like the materials in Kuwayama’s collection, the Rakuko Naito Papers document emerging aesthetics and schools in midcentury New York. In the mid-1960s, Naito painted geometric forms with optical effects. One of her first exhibitions was in May 1965 at the World House Galleries in New York City. Her contributions to Op art were later recognized in The Optical Edge, a 2007 survey of the movement organized by the Pratt Institute that also featured work by Albers, Bridget Riley, and Victor Vasarely. The collection includes material related to this exhibition.

Exhibition flyers and photographs trace Naito’s evolving concerns with form, nature, and the artist’s hand over her illustrious career. In the late 1970s, Naito moved away from Op art to large-scale representational paintings of flowers. Images from her 1978 exhibition at the Juliet Art Museum in West Virginia (formerly known as the Charleston Art Gallery at Sunrise) depict her flower paintings. Despite her turn to representational painting, Naito’s continued formal interest in pattern can be seen in the way she fills each canvas with a single flower, emphasizing the natural repetition of its concentric petals. In the 1990s, the artist shifted to working with paper, wire, and cotton, which she arranged into geometric forms within frames.

A 1991 photograph of Kuwayama and Naito together at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, highlights their (often underrecognized) contributions to minimalism in the US. The couple poses in front of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s collaborative sculpture Monument to the Last Horse, the same year the husband-and-wife team finished the monumental work. In this way, two dynamic art couples commune at a historic site for contemporary American art. As the artists’ papers show, Kuwayama and Naito often exhibited alongside and were friends with many of the most important figures in midcentury American art.

Christina Ayson-Plank is the Asian Pacific American collections specialist at the Archives of American Art.