Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Installation, Curatorial
Website: bettynobuekano.com
Betty Nobue Kano was born in 1944 in Sendai, Japan, and moved to California with her family as a child. She earned a B.A. in painting from San Francisco State College in 1967 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. She has lived and worked in Berkeley for most of her career, building a five-decade practice as a painter, curator, lecturer, and organizer.
Kano’s paintings have appeared in nearly 200 regional, national, and international exhibitions, including solo shows at the Triton Museum of Art, the Plaza Gallery at Bank of America World Headquarters in San Francisco, and the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery at UC Santa Cruz, where her 1993 installation All The Earth Is Red In Cuba addressed Afro-Cuban spiritual and political themes. Alongside her studio practice, she built an extensive curatorial career, serving as Executive Director of Pro Arts in Oakland from 1997 to 2002, where she curated a string of exhibitions on race, incarceration, and homelessness, and taking curatorial roles for the National Japanese American Historical Society, the Euphrat Museum, and the Jamaica Art Center in New York. In 1989 she co-founded the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) with Flo Oy Wong, and she also helped organize Art Against Apartheid, Godzilla West, and Women of Color Camp. She taught for many years in the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University (1999–2015), as well as at Laney College, UC Santa Cruz, California College of Arts and Crafts, and New College of California.
Her honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Residency Fellowship in the Humanities (1991), the “Sisters of Fire” Award from the Women of Color Resource Center (2002), and a Community Leadership Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society (2011). Her papers, spanning circa 1970–2024, were acquired by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. In 2024 her work and organizing history were the subject of renewed attention in three concurrent exhibitions: Godzilla: Echoes From the 1990s Asian American Arts Network in New York, In the Presence Of: Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association at the Berkeley Art Center, and Reshaping the Narrative: California Perspectives at the Mills College Art Museum.
Kano’s paintings are built in layers — early works submerge graffiti-like handwriting and text beneath washes of radiant, transparent acrylic color, while later bodies of work resolve into more solid, interlocking color shapes and triptych structures. Her surfaces frequently incorporate mixed-media elements such as cloth, ribbon, seed pods, leaves, and thread, extending the paintings toward assemblage and installation.
Thematically, her work moves between the personal and the political: Yoruba/Orisha spiritual iconography and Afro-Cuban and African diasporic references sit alongside meditations on Japanese American history, incarceration, and family, and explicitly feminist and social-justice content. Recurring bodies of work — including the Love Letters series, the Initiation Series, and Music With Heart — treat color and symbol as vehicles for what she has described as “creative spirituality and social transformation.”
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