This piece was inspired by the 15th century Japanese scroll painting, “Tale of Amewakahiko”. In the medieval tale, a girl, in love with a boy who lived in the sky, went there to meet him. But the boy's father, a demon, hated humans. He gave the girl various difficult tasks to keep her from meeting his son. One of the tasks was to move thousands of rice crops from one storage area to another - an almost impossible task - until an army of small ants came out to help her. To Chizuco, when small forces unite and act together, the collective strength is especially moving. In her oil on canvas painting, she depicts a quietly powerful scene of tiny ants marching. By using a reductive color palette, the diagonal composition radiates a continuously flowing energy.

Born in Japan, Sophia Chizuco is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her B.A. in art and education from Tokyo Gakugei University. In 2000, she moved to New York to study abstract paintings at the Art Students League of New York and earned a certificate in painting for her studies. In 2019, she was selected as a leader for the “Hospital-Based Community Murals Project“ at NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine program, New York. She was selected for projectart, art and social practice, artists in residence in Cypress Hills library and SU-CASA, artist-in-residence in Young Israel Senior Services Neighborhood Senior Center. Since 2013, Chizuco has been a part of the Immigrant Artist Program, acting as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts. She held origami workshops for immigrants at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the National Yiddish Theatre and painting workshop at the I am an Immigrant event. Also, she organized and curated shows for immigrant artists.

Exhibitions

March 2021, Yi Gallery, Benefit Exhibition for #StopAsianHate