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Artworks
Miya Ando b. 1973
039 Full They Give Thanks Moon (Anishinaabe) 5 November 2025, 2023Natural Indigo, Micronized Pure Silver, Hahnemühle Paper11 x 8.5 in
27.94 x 21.59 cm8893Further images
This work is part of Miya Ando’s series of “Future Moons.” For this series, Ando picks dates in the future and paints the phase the moon is projected to be...This work is part of Miya Ando’s series of “Future Moons.” For this series, Ando picks dates in the future and paints the phase the moon is projected to be in on that date. It is an extension of a long running series of indigo paintings of the moon that Ando began painting on the first day of COVID lockdown in New York City. She called the project Moon Almanac. She ended that project on September 7, 2022, the day the Mayor of New York declared it was okay to stop wearing masks in public. Although the COVID phase of her Moon Almanac project has come to an end, Ando has continued creating indigo paintings of the moon in its various phases and manifestations. The titles of all of Ando’s moon phase paintings are presented in two languages. Ando is half Japanese and half American, and is bi-lingual. She has made an exhaustive study of words and phrases that exist in Japanese that do not seem to have an English equivalent. She refers to these linguistic anomalies as “lacunae” or lexical gaps. She has cataloged more than 1100 Japanese words and phrases describing specific manifestations of the moon that do not have straightforward English equivalents. As part of her Future Moon series, Ando has begun looking into the languages of the Indigenous cultures of the Western Hemisphere, which similarly to Japanese culture are attuned to the natural world and whose languages reflect a minute observation of nature. This project compares nature-based cultures via language, illustrated by the significant vocabularies describing the moon and its manifestations. That research has revealed that indeed many Western Indigenous languages accommodate scores, sometimes even hundreds more ways of describing the moon and its manifestations than are offered by the English language. Ando has received permission from certain tribal authorities to utilize some of these words and phrases to describe the paintings in her Future Moon series. The title of each of these paintings reflects the language from which it originates.