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| one of Asawa's 'shaggy' chrysanthemum pieces.Credit...Ramona Jingru Wang for The New York Times |
NYT article by Deborah Solomon about Asawa show at MOMA.
Some highlights:
She was easy to locate; she did much of her artwork in her living room in the Noe Valley neighborhood in San Francisco. We know from photographs that she liked to sit on the floor, cross-legged and within reach of her materials — spools of inexpensive industrial wire. From this hardware-store staple, she spun, loop by loop, inch by inch, fabulous abstract sculptures that hung from the ceiling and mesmerized visitors to her home with their lacy delicacy and wavy, spiraling silhouettes.
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Granted, Asawa was not mainly interested in inventing a new formal language. She wasn’t trying to be the next Picasso. She was trying to be herself. Some of the loveliest works in the show are ink drawings in which she relinquishes her early yen for abstraction and faithfully depict petunias and poppies.
She apparently made a drawing or a watercolor every day. Most subjects were culled from her garden. Her line drawings are careful, precise compositions untouched by crosshatching or shadows. She loved rendering shaggy chrysanthemums, with their mass of spindly petals, a challenging subject that she undertook in black ink, with the assurance of a person doing a crossword puzzle with a pen. She had no need for erasure.
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Some of the niftiest objects in the show pertain to art education. I was fascinated by a mimeographed booklet entitled “Milk Carton Sculpture.” Asawa wrote it with fellow artists, and it is a breakfast-table fantasy come true. It tells you how to build intricate, multipart structures from milk cartons. You start by cutting your carton into thin strips. Then you decide whether you want your sculpture to be decorative (as in “a floral star”); modular (a pineapple); or mathematical (“a truncated cube.”).
When Asawa began her career, such projects tended to be maligned as female busywork that lacked the gravitas of high art. But the boundary separating craft and art has thankfully been dissolved. In an age when many young artists incorporate sewing, knitting and appliqué into their paintings and sculptures, Asawa’s belief in the nobility of labor-intensive, do-it-yourself projects undertaken with materials that can probably be found in your kitchen drawer, demands to be recognized as pioneering.
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Asawa rarely spoke about the 16 months she spent in detention camps. But then perhaps she didn’t need to. Her looping-wire sculptures, her deepest and most satisfying works, invariably recall the wire that once confined a teenage girl and her family to a place that denied them their rights and dignity.
In Asawa’s hands, wire was transformed from an instrument of imprisonment into a lifeline, a route to imaginative freedom. She created a world in which forms brim and bloom and multiply without end. As much as that of any artist, Asawa’s work affirms the power of art to allow us to begin anew.
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| Asawa’s piece based on a gift bouquet from Anni Albers, the artist-weaver and wife of Josef Albers; .Credit...Ramona Jingru Wang for The New York Times |
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