Ruth Asawa

Ruth Aiko Asawa (Japanese: 浅和 愛子, January 24, 1926 – August 5, 2013) was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of works on paper, including abstract and figurative drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.

Born in Norwalk, California in 1926, Asawa was the fourth of seven children born to Japanese immigrants. She grew up on a truck farm. In 1942, her family was separated when they were sent to different Japanese internment camps as a result of isolation policies for Japanese-Americans mandated by the U.S. government during World War II. At Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, Asawa learned drawing from illustrators interned at the camp. In 1943, she was able to leave the camp to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, where she hoped to become a teacher but was unable to complete her studies because her Japanese ancestry prevented her from obtaining a teaching position in Wisconsin.

In 1946, Asawa joined the avant-garde artistic community at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied under the influential 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 basket crocheting technique she learned in 1947 during a trip to Mexico. In 1955, she held her first exhibition in New York and by the early 1960s, she had achieved commercial and critical success and became an advocate for public art according to her belief of "art for everyone". She 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. 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. 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, and was one of seven children. Her parents, immigrants from Japan, operated a truck farm until the Japanese American internment during World War II. Except for Ruth's father, the family was interned at an assembly center hastily set up at the Santa Anita racetrack for much of 1942, after which they were sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. Ruth's father, Umakichi Asawa, was arrested by FBI agents in February 1942 and interned at a detention camp in New Mexico. For six months following, the Asawa family did not know if he was alive or dead. Asawa did not see her father for six years. Ruth's younger sister, Nancy (Kimiko), was visiting family in Japan when her family was interned. She was unable to return, as the U.S. prevented entry even of American citizens from Japan. Nancy was forced to stay in Japan for the duration of the war. 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.

Asawa became interested in art at an early age. As a child, she was encouraged by her third grade teacher to create her own artwork. As a result, Asawa received first prize in a school arts competition in 1939, for her artwork about what makes someone American.

Following her graduation from the internment center's high school, Asawa attended Milwaukee State Teachers College, intending to become an art teacher. She was prevented from attending college on the California coast, as the war had continued and the zone of her intended college was still declared prohibited to ethnic Japanese, whether or not they were American citizens. Unable to get hired for the requisite practice teaching to complete her degree, she left Wisconsin without a degree. (Wisconsin awarded the degree to her in 1998.) Asawa recounted an experience when stopping in Missouri to use the restroom and she and her sister didn't know which bathroom to use. There was a colored and a white toilet at the bus stop and because of the racial discrimination at the time they chose to use the colored toilet. Once at Black Mountain there was more equality for her and other minority students including other Asian Americans and African Americans. While on campus they were equals but in town the reality of racism in America was evident. This led to a direct sense of social consciousness in Asawa's sculptures and an intimacy influenced by the adversity her family experienced as a minority in America.

The summer before her final year in Milwaukee, Asawa traveled to Mexico with her older sister Lois (Masako). Asawa attended an art class at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; among her teachers was Clara Porset, an interior designer from Cuba. A friend of artist Josef Albers, Porset told Asawa about Black Mountain College where he was teaching. Asawa 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. Asawa learned to use commonplace materials from Albers and began experimenting with wire, using a variety of techniques. Like all Black Mountain College students, Asawa took courses across a variety of different art forms and this interdisciplinary approach helped to shape her artistic practice. Her study of drawing with Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers was formative. Her drawings from this time explore pattern and repetition, and she was especially intrigued by the meander as a motif. She was particularly influenced by the summer sessions of 1946 and 1948, which featured courses by artist Jacob Lawrence, photography curator and historian Beaumont Newhall, Jean Varda, composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Willem de Kooning, sculptor Leo Amino, and R. Buckminster Fuller. According to Asawa, the dance courses she took with Merce Cunningham were especially inspirational. In one class that included fellow student Robert Rauschenberg, Asawa reported that they ran down a large hill like it was a dance with flaming torches blasting Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. In contrast, Asawa described her experiences studying under Josef Albers as more formalist and what other students described as Fascist in demeanor and did not consider the feelings of his students in his teachings. He preferred to teach exploration and discover through design rather than the regurgitated freeloaded knowledge taught by other academics. Asawa connected with this approach because of her family's cultural background and what she describes as an intolerance for emotion.

Career

In the 1950s, while a student at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, Asawa made a series of crocheted wire sculptures in various abstract forms. Asawa felt that she and her fellow students were ahead of the administration with developing their own form of modernism in sculpture, constantly trying new things. She began with basket designs, and later explored biomorphic forms that hung from the ceiling. She learned the wire-crocheting technique while on a trip to visit Josef Albers while he was on sabbatical in 1947 Toluca, Mexico, where villagers used a similar technique to make baskets from galvanized wire. She explained:

I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It's still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.

After her trip to Mexico, Asawa's drawing teacher, Ilya Bolotowsky, noted that her interest in conventional drawing had been replaced by a fascination with using wire as a way of drawing in space. Her looped-wire sculptures explore the relationship of interior and exterior volumes, creating, as she put it, "a shape that was inside and outside at the same time." They have been described as embodying various material states: interior and exterior, line and volume, past and future. Asawa said "It was in 1946 when I thought I was modern. But now it’s 2002 and you can’t be modern forever." while she was developing her materiality and techniques, experimenting with manual means of visual communications. Experimentation was key in finding her visual identity as an artist. While her technique for making sculptures resembles weaving, she did not study weaving, nor did she use fiber materials. Materials mattered. As a poor college student Asawa embraced inexpensive found objects such as rocks, leaves and sticks because they neither had the funds or access to good paper. Proximity and discovery was their resource.