Ruth Asawa Sculptor of Space in three books

 

Ruth Asawa: Sculptor of Space

Ruth Asawa had an extraordinary childhood. In her early years she grew up on a farm with her immigrant parents, sharing in the hard work.

 

That idea of hard work stayed with her throughout her career as an artist. In April 1942, when she was sixteen her family was sent to a detention camp, first at Sant Anita racetrack, then Rohwer Camp in Arkansas.  At the Santa Anita camp she had the fortune of learning from three Asian American artists for Disney.

 

After she graduated from high school in the Rohwer camp in August 1943, she was allowed to leave as long as she stayed away from the West Coast. She went to Milwaukee State Teachers College,

 

After learning she could not teach, she  had the opportunity to go to Black Mountain College the experimental interdisciplinary arts school. It changed the course of her life.

These are some of the details with which Marilyn Chase begins her book , Everything She Touched, The Life of Ruth Asawa..

 

Chase carefully describes the artist’s unusual education at Black Mountain College, her study with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, her love affair with Alfred Lanier, and her move to San Francisco to start her family and her career. She was life long friends with Albers and Fuller.

Chase’s book is an easy read and it includes a continuous narrative that focuses on her professional activity and her personal life, much of it based on letters.

 

Asawa’s woven wire sculpture were embedded in her home. In the current retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photograph of her living room in front of a partial recreation of  the space. We see her sculpture hanging from the ceiling throughout the huge space.

 

She welcomed her children to be part of the creativity,: a baby sitting in a wire basket as Asawa wove around him, and her other children pursued their own creative endeavors as she worked. Shw was photographed by Imogen Cunningham, her dear friend, many times.

 

 

 

Jordan Troeller  Ruth Asawa and The Artist-Mother at Midcentury emphasizes the ways in which Asawa, together with other what she calls “artist-mothers” managed to produce extraordinary art as they were raising  children.  Troeller’s focus is to combine motherhood and creativity (she leads a research group on “The M/Other Project: Creativity, Procreation, and Contemporary Art,”).

 

Ruth Asawa raised six children, defying the idea that having children prevents woman from making creative art.  Various Asawa techniques such as weaving and knitting, connect to female traditions, Troeller suggests, because they enable the artist to start and stop as is necessary with children. Actually Asawa’s incorporation of her children into her art process defies that logic. Asawa’s work ethic and ability to embrace creativity as a generous gift, meant that she worked almost nonstop, with her children helping as they grew older.

 

Other chapters in Troeller’s bookfocus on flowers, folding, or

pregnancy, to name only a few, themes, integrating them with aspects of her work.

The best known image of pregnancy is the “Andrea” cast bronze public sculpture in San Francisco. I found the book a bit overboard in connecting everything to a feminist analysis- if she had not been so focused on motherhood, as metaphor and literally, her analysis would have been more useful. It is clearly, though, a feminist answer to patriarchal tropes and the parameters of making art as a woman.

 

 

As an art historian, I have to say that the large book accompanying her major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art is comprehensive and invaluable. Janet Bishop, editor, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, includes essay after essay that clearly follow a theme such as “From Tool to Ornament, Ruth’s Intricate Refusals,” and “What Cannot Be Produced Alone : Ruth Asawa’s Public Art.”

The exhibition follows all the stages of her art career, from single woven wire baskets to complex hanging sculptures enclosing one orb inside another. Then a new technique of tying wire, electroplating it,

 

 

and much more. These dazzling hanging works are her best known work.

 

The complete discussion of her public art is also represented in the catalog and the exhibition, where we saw studies and photographs.  The installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art even included a sample of her garden.

For Asawa, as we learn in this thorough study, Zen Buddhism was part of her world view, as well as nature itself. Her drawings of leaves and plants show her understanding  of the intricacies of the natural world.

 

In the chapter on public art, bronze casting is a major departure, as well as the scale of the works she took on, a huge low relief of the Japanese Internments camps, a wall called San Francisco Fountain, with many small reliefs of life in San Franciso, and many more..

 

Her creativity also extended to schoolchildren, teaching innovative ways to make art with materials such as milk cartons, and “bakers clay” (flour, salt and water.)

 

 

Last, Asawa  engaged with civic affairs, founding an art school, now called the “Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts,” and lobbying for more art education in the public schools.

 

 

The magnificent sculptures that Ruth Asawa created hang in space, and surround space. They embrace interior and exterior, the delicate and the strong, the idea of growth and the idea of stasis. It is hard to overstate her contribution: her wire-based art, at first seen as simply decorative, is now understood as major accomplishments of twentieth century sculpture