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| Ruth Asawa (second from left) with visitors to her 1973 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA). Her looped-wire forms made of pliable copper, brass or steel resembled her early drawings of dancers, floating abstracted figure-eight forms, nipped at the center with spherical heads and bodies.Credit...Laurence Cuneo |
More on Ruth Asawa from earlier NYT article:
“A lot of times she worked right here,” Paul said, pointing to a discreet hook at the center of a double-wide door frame between the living room and kitchen, where Asawa would hang her looped-wire works in process. She used a knit stitch by hand, which she learned from a local wire-basket maker on a 1947 trip to Mexico, to draw in space and define volumes with a continuous line of pliable copper, brass or steel.
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She was rejected all four times that she applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. But as distinctions between art and craft have dissolved and artists long overlooked because of their race or gender are being reappraised, Asawa’s looped-wire forms have been widely acclaimed for transforming a utilitarian material and innovating on techniques that added buoyancy and transparency in sculpture.
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Asawa’s life started on a farm southeast of Los Angeles where she was one of seven children of Japanese immigrant parents. She and her siblings did farm work before and after school, in early morning, late nights and on Sundays. Saturdays they studied Japanese, including calligraphy.
“We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment,” Asawa told an interviewer in 2001. “We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within the forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.”
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In 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Asawa, age 16, and her family were among more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent — mostly American citizens — held by the government in internment camps. For six months, Asawa slept in a horse stall at the converted Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, Calif., and was tutored for six hours a day by three detained Disney animators who taught the children how to draw.
“You have to say for her it was a mixed blessing,” Addie said.
Asawa was transferred to Rohwer, Ark., where a Quaker organization arranged for her to continue her education at Milwaukee State Teachers College, and she learned about the interdisciplinary utopian college in Black Mountain. Beginning there in 1946, she met Albert “on a mountain path,” he recalled in 2002. In a 1948 letter to him, Asawa called herself a “citizen of the universe,” refusing to be defined by race or trauma. They married in 1949 with Albers’s approval. (Both families initially objected to the interracial union, which was then illegal in all but two states, California and Washington.)
For her “San Francisco Fountain,” Asawa had more than 250 schoolchildren and adults contribute little figures and city landmarks molded in her signature playdough on its 41 panels, then cast in bronze.
When SFMOMA gave her a midcareer survey in 1973, “it was her preference to have a dough-in where thousands of people could make baker’s clay figurines in lieu of a snooty opening,” the museum’s Bishop said.
A member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the artist was a driving force behind the establishment of the San Francisco School of the Arts, a public high school, in 1982. “She wanted real artists in the classrooms,” said Susan Stauter, artistic director emeritus for the San Francisco Unified School District. “She brought the Black Mountain College ethic with her. It was almost a religious commitment.”
After Asawa developed lupus in 1985, she focused on drawings from her garden, which the retrospective also spotlights. Her hands became too unsteady after 2000 to continue drawing.
Asawa maintained that artists weren't special; they were just ordinary people who could “take ordinary things and make them special,” she said. “I always had my studio in my house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me — or a peanut butter sandwich.”
On This Day (11/23):
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