was an American modernist artist primarily known for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created figurative and abstract drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants.
Born in Norwalk, California in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa was the fourth of seven children and grew up on a truck farm. In 1942, her family was sent to different Japanese internment camps as a result of U.S. isolation policies during World War II. At the Rohwer War Relocation Center, Asawa learned to draw from animators who previously worked at Walt Disney Studios interned there. In 1943, she was able to leave the camp to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College on scholarship. Hoping to become a teacher, Asawa was ultimately unable to, as her Japanese ancestry prevented her from obtaining a teaching position in Wisconsin.
In 1945, Ruth and her older sister traveled outside of the U.S. to study in Mexico. She was taken by the colors and arts there. It was during her second trip to Mexico in 1947 that she learned the knitted-wire loop technique from a Mexican teacher, which she used to make the sculptures for which she is most famous
Eventually in 1946, Asawa joined the avant-garde artistic community at Black Mountain College, where she studied under German-American Bauhaus painter and color theorist Josef Albers, as well as the American architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. At Black Mountain College, Asawa began making looped-wire sculptures inspired by the basket crocheting technique she learned on a 1947 trip to Mexico. In 1955, she held her first exhibition in New York. By the early 1960s, Asawa had achieved commercial and critical success and became an advocate for public art, saying, "art for everyone." Asawa was the driving force behind the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.
Her work is featured in collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.RELEASE: RUTH ASAWA Christie's; April 2, 2013. Fifteen of Asawa's wire sculptures are on permanent display in the tower of San Francisco's de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, and several of her fountains are located in public places in San Francisco.Anders, Corrie M (November 2005) "Ruth Asawa's Sculptures on Prominent Display in De Young." Noe Valley Voice. (Retrieved June 21, 2018.) In 2019, Asawa and her work was the subject of the Google Doodle celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Month in the U.S. In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service honored her work by producing a series of ten stamps that commemorate her well-known wire sculptures.
Early life and education Ruth Aiko Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California. The fourth of seven children, her parents, immigrants from Japan, operated a truck farm that produced walnuts and dairies until the Japanese American internment during World War II. Besides Asawa's father, the family was interned at an assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack for much of 1942. After 1942, they were sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. Asawa said about the internment:I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.Editors (May 1, 2019) "Who Is Ruth Asawa, the Artist in Today's Google Doodle?" New York Times. (Retrieved May 1, 2019.)
Asawa became interested in art at an early age. As a child, her third grade teacher encouraged her to create her own artwork. At the internment camp, her family was also detained alongside a group of artists from the Walt Disney studios, who led classes for children in the camp.
Following her graduation from the internment center's high school, Asawa received a scholarship from a Quaker organisation to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College to become an art teacher, whilst working as live-in-servant to fund her bed and board. Unable to secure the required practice teaching hours to complete her degree because no-one would provide a person with Japanese parentage work experience, she left Wisconsin without a degree. (Wisconsin awarded the degree to her in 1998). Asawa recounted an experience in Missouri when she and her sister didn't know which bathroom to use and chose to use the colored toilet.
In 1945, the summer before her final year in Milwaukee, Asawa decided to travel to Mexico with her older sister Lois Misako (Asawa) Shishido instead of going to Black Mountain. There, Asawa studied art at two Mexican schools. First, she and Lois attended the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Lois studied the Spanish language, and Asawa studied both the Spanish language and Mexican art. Among her teachers was Clara Porset, an interior designer from Cuba and friend of artist Josef Albers. Porset told Asawa about Black Mountain College, where he was teaching. Asawa also took a class in sculpture and painting at "La Esmeralda" or Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado.Asawa, Ruth, Harriet Nathan, Albert Lanier, Arts and the Community Oral History Project, and Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office. 1980. Ruth Asawa—Art, Competence, and Citywide Cooperation for San Francisco : An Interview. Berkeley, Calif.: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. It was through a teacher that she was able to see Orozco's mural and learn how to apply fresh plaster to a mural in progress by American artist George Biddle called War and Peace at the Supreme Court of Mexico. Ruth Asawa, who would eventually return to Mexico in 1947 to learn the knitted wire technique that she used to make her famous sculptures, was drawn to Mexico for its colors, ceramics, decorative arts, and painting.Chase, Marilyn. 2020. Everything She Touched : The Life of Ruth Asawa. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Originally Asawa wanted to be an art teacher but Asawa has since recounted:I was told that it might be difficult for me, with the memories of the war still fresh, to work in a public school. My life might even be in danger. This was a godsend, because it encouraged me to follow my interest in art, and I subsequently enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.From 1946 to 1949, she studied at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers after being recruited by artist Ray Johnson. Under Albers's mentorship, Asawa learned to use commonplace materials and began experimenting with wire."Life: Black Mountain College ", section "Influences". Ruth Asawa. Estate of Ruth Asawa. ruthasawa.com. Retrieved October 13, 2017. Like other Black Mountain College students, Asawa took courses on different art forms, which shaped her artistic practice. Under Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers's mentorship, her drawings explore patterns and repetition, bird and chevron motifs, overlapping forms, and optical illusions. She was especially intrigued by the meander as a motif. Asawa found the summer sessions, called the Summer Institute, of 1946 and 1948, which featured courses by Jacob Lawrence, Beaumont Newhall, Jean Varda, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Leo Amino, and R. Buckminster Fuller particularly influential. According to Asawa, the dance courses she took with Merce Cunningham were especially inspirational. In one class, Asawa recalls running down a large hill with flaming torches to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. In contrast, Asawa described her experiences studying under Josef Albers as more formalist, which she connected with due to her cultural background and what she described as an intolerance for emotion. Asawa retook the same design, color, and drawing and painting courses with Albers for multiple years and found that ruminating on the same problems led to deeper feelings towards the work. Her experience at Black Mountain and the adversity her family faced led to the social consciousness seen in her sculptures.
Career In 1947, while a student at Black Mountain College, Asawa made a series of abstract looped-wire sculptures using a wire-looping technique she learned from craftspeople in Toluca, Mexico, where she visited Josef Albers on sabbatical. Asawa was initially inspired by the market baskets with eggs and other produce she saw. She explained: Asawa began with basket designs and later explored bimorphic forms that hang from the ceiling. She felt that she and her classmates were ahead of the Black Mountain College administration in developing their own form of modernism in sculpture. Still, Asawa appreciated Black Mountain College for its equality and for giving students the freedom to explore.
Following her trip to Mexico, Asawa's drawing teacher, Ilya Bolotowsky, noted her new fascination with using wire as a way of drawing in space. Asawa described her looped-wire sculptures as shapes that are simultaneously inside and outside, embodying interior and exterior, line and volume, and past and future material states. She believed it was important to have a relationship with the past and present and not to be just modern or just old.
Experimentation was key to finding her visual identity as an artist. While her technique resembles weaving, Asawa did not study weaving nor use fiber materials. In college, she embraced inexpensive found objects such as rocks, leaves, and sticks.
Asawa's unconventional hanging wire sculptures were not immediately accepted until her work was featured on the covers of Arts & Architecture in 1952 and Vogue in 1953. She continued to rise in prominence in the 1950s, when her work appeared several times in the Whitney Biennial, in a 1954 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial.
In 1962, Asawa began experimenting with tied wire sculptures of branching forms rooted in nature. Over time, these forms became increasingly geometric and abstract."Art: Sculpture ", section: "Tied Wire Sculpture". Ruth Asawa. Estate of Ruth Asawa. ruthasawa.com. Retrieved October 13, 2017. At times, she treated the wire by galvanizing it. She also experimented with electroplating or running the electric current in the "wrong" direction to create textural effects. On Asawa's impact, Daniell Cornell, curator of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, said:Ruth was ahead of her time in understanding how sculptures could function to define and interpret space... This aspect of her work anticipates much of the installation work that has come to dominate contemporary art.Cooper, Ashton (November 26, 2013). "Ruth Asawa's Late, Meteoric Rise From Obscurity" . BlouinArtinfo. Retrieved December 6, 2014.In 1965, Asawa participated in the Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship in Los Angeles. Collaborating with the seven printmakers at the workshop, she produced fifty-two lithographs of friends, family (including her parents, Umakichi and Haru), natural objects, and plants.