top of Mylar with inks and acrylics to get a unique texture for these works. Chodos published Metamorphoses: The Transformative Vision of Junko Chodos, a catalog of the one-person exhibition of the art of Junko Chodos at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the Fall of 2001. The book featured full-color high-quality reproductions and five critical essays. The works included a selection from collages to mylars included in her "Esoteric Buddhism" series, inside CD jewel boxes. The book won "Best Art Book of the Year - First Prize"" from Independent Publisher in 2002. In 2005, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in Missouri presented a 30-year retrospective of her work titled "Junko Chodos: The Breath of Consciousness". The exhibition title referenced a recurrent image in her work: the lungs. The exhibition included complex drawings of roots and dead flowers and works from a 1991 series, "Requiem for an Executed Bird". In the same year, the Fresno Art Museum Council of 100 gave Junko Chodos The Distinguished Woman Artist Award. The award is given to a woman who "has spent thirty or more years in the studio and has created a unique and prestigious body of work." Her influences include Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Matthias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer and Japanese calligraphy, as well as the authors Rainer Maria Rilke, Herbert Read and Martin Buber. In 2010, Chodos was named a Fellow of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture. Centripetal Art Junko Chodos has termed her art as "Centripetal" in nature. The New Republic defines centripetal artists as artists "whose preoccupation is directed to a dramatization of their accidental or willful individualism". A centripetal painter "believes in self-illumination, improvisation, speaking for himself alone", they "look to museums when not at mirrors". Junko Chodos herself defines it as "art created by an artist who strives towards her center and encounters Divine Presence there, where people go beyond the barriers of ethnicity, gender, religious denominations, dogma, and of confined ideas of blood and soil. In 2008, Junko and her husband formed the Foundation for Centripetal Art to spread its ideas. References Further reading Ellens, J. Harold. "Why on Earth does God Have to Paint? Centripetal Art." CrossCurrents 61.2 (2011): 271-275. External links Centripetal Art 1939 births Living people 20th-century American painters 20th-century American women artists 20th-century Japanese women artists 21st-century American women artists 21st-century Japanese women artists Artists from