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About Joan B Mirviss LTD
For nearly fifty years, Joan B Mirviss LTD has specialized in Japanese art. We have organized and mounted more than 100 exhibitions of modern and contemporary Japanese ceramics at our Madison Avenue gallery in New York City and at international fairs, bringing the work of celebrated artists as well as hitherto-unknown talents to the attention of the American public. As the foremost gallery in the field, we exclusively represent top Japanese ceramic artists. Additional specializations include fine ukiyo-e prints and Japanese painting.
In March 2025, in conjunction with the first comprehensive retrospective of master clay artist Wada Morihiro, we published Beyond the Surface: The Unity of Form and Pattern in the Work of Wada Morihiro, a fully illustrated, bilingual book on the seminal figure featuring essays by top scholars and museum curators. Other key gallery publications include Vessel Explored / Vessel Transformed: Tomimoto Kenkichi and His Enduring Legacy (2019) and Birds of Dawn: The Pioneers of Japan’s Ceramic Sōdeisha Movement (2011), both of which accompanied groundbreaking gallery exhibitions.
Since 2020, we have organized and hosted more than forty webinar panels on a variety of Japanese art topics, from the history of Zen ink painting to the role of Japanese aesthetics in contemporary interior design. All have featured expert scholars, museum curators, and specialists, and many were organized in collaboration with top museums and other cultural organizations. Recordings of these panels can be viewed on our website under the “Video” tab.
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39 East 78th Street, Suite 401
New York, NY 10075
Monday - Friday, 11am - 6pm
And by appointment
Telephone (212) 799-4021
Fax (212) 721-5148
Joan B Mirviss
President
joan@mirviss.com
Chelsea Cooksey, MA
Director
director@mirviss.com
Nicolle Bertozzi, PhD
Gallery Manager
gm@mirviss.com
Akane Yanagisawa, BA, BS
Japanese Coordinator
jp@mirviss.com
Gracie Davis, BA
Graphic Designer
admin@mirviss.com
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Joan B MirvissJoan B Mirviss is an expert and major dealer in Japanese art, specializing in ceramics, ukiyo-e prints, and paintings for nearly fifty years. In the area of modern and contemporary Japanese ceramic art in the West, she has been the pioneering spirit and force behind this burgeoning field.
Widely published and a highly respected specialist in her field, Mirviss has advised and built collections for many museums and private collectors. She is the co-founder of Asia Week New York Association and is a longtime member of The National Antiques & Art Dealers Association of America and CINOA.
Mirviss received her M.A. in Japanese art history from Columbia University and has written books and articles on a wide range of Japanese art-related subjects as well as lectured at museums and universities in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her clients include more than sixty museums throughout the world.
Published in 2019 by the Kyoto art publisher Mitsumura Suiko Shoin, her book The Allure of Japanese Contemporary Ceramics focuses on the past twenty years of passionate collecting and exhibitions by leading American museums and private collectors. She has collaborated on numerous exhibitions and publications. Her essay on contemporary Japanese ceramics will be published in the forthcoming A Global History of Ceramics in Japan, the first multi-author, comprehensive English-language study of Japanese ceramics. In 2015, she was involved in the publication and exhibition at the Walters Art Museum, Japanese Ceramics for the Twenty-first Century, of her clients’ collection. In 2018, she authored a catalogue and curated a series of three rotations of contemporary Japanese ceramics for the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada, titled JAPAN/NOW. She wrote for and assisted with Hands and Clay: Six Perspectives on Japanese Contemporary Ceramics for the Lowe and Crow Art Museums in Florida and Texas. Additionally, she was instrumental in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s 2022 exhibition, Kamoda Shōji: The Art of Change.
Mirviss has also been active in both curatorial and scholarly projects relating to Japanese prints. Most notably, in 1995, she curated the exhibition of the Frank Lloyd Wright surimono print collection shown at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for which she co-authored the accompanying publication, The Frank Lloyd Wright Collection of Surimono. In 2000, she curated an exhibition and authored the catalogue titled Jewels of Japanese Printmaking: Surimono of the Bunka and Bunsei Era for the prominent Japanese print museum in Tokyo, the Ota Memorial Art Museum. More recently she contributed to the publication Reading Surimono for the Rietberg Museum in Zürich.
Currently, she sits on the council for the Chazen Museum of Art, the Board of Visitors for the Department of Art History, and for the College of Letters and Science, all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Additionally, she is a member of the councils for the Wallach Art Gallery and the Women’s Health Care Council for the medical school, both at Columbia University. She is also a member of the advisory council for the Gallery at Japan Society, New York.
