My teachers at Black Mountain College were practicing artists. . . . They taught me that there is no separation between studying, performing the daily chores of living, and creating one’s own work. Through them I came to understand the total commitment required to be an artist.
Ruth Asawa, “Artist’s Statement,” in Ruth Asawa: Completing the Circle, ed. Philip E. Linhares (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California, 2002).
Ruth Asawa learned how to loop with wire from a craftsman in Toluca, Mexico, where in 1947 she traveled on summer break from Black Mountain College.1 Upon her return, she began working with the material in a more abstract way, as a line that could interlock, interweave, and go anywhere in space: “You don’t think ahead of time, ‘this is what I want.’ You work on it as you go along. You make a line, a two-dimensional line, then you go into space, and you have a three-dimensional piece. It’s like a drawing in space.”2 With the simple e-shaped crochet loop, she could draw and sculpt simultaneously. Asawa always began from the inside out, creating orbs that seem to float within larger spheres. The outside surface of the smaller sphere folds over to become the inside surface of the sphere around it so, like a line, there is continuity.
Paul J. Karlstrom, “Interview with Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier Conducted for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,” excerpted in The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, ed. Daniell Cornell (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 118. ↩︎
Leah Ollman, “The Industrious Line,” Art in America, May 2007, 162. ↩︎
Ruth Asawa attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946 to 1949, studying with artist Josef Albers and architect Buckminster Fuller, whose lessons had a profound impact on her life work. At Black Mountain, teachers privileged problem-solving and the process of making art as much as the final object.1 The school’s spirit of discipline, economy, and resourceful creativity echoed that of her upbringing during the Great Depression in Norwalk, California—a small agricultural town in Los Angeles County, where her family worked on a large-production vegetable farm. Albers instructed that all materials, no matter how common, have potential. Under his direction, her exercises in repetition, pattern, and form2 on paper—her attention would soon turn from paper to copper and brass wire—taught her how to allow shape to emerge from a material rather than impose predetermined ideas upon it.3 Meanwhile, Fuller’s ideas about the connections between design and society and his commitment to addressing basic needs like shelter, as in his geodesic dome, instilled in Asawa a belief in the continuity of the self, art, and society.4 With these integrated approaches to artmaking as a model, her practice would span from individual objects to public monuments to the Alvarado School Art Workshop—a community-based arts program Asawa started in 1968 in San Francisco public schools.
Karin Higa, “What Is an Asian American Woman Artist?” in Art, Women, California 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, ed. Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 86. ↩︎
Leah Ollman, “The Industrious Line,” Art in America, May 2007, 161. ↩︎
Robert Snyder, Ruth Asawa: Of Forms and Growth, produced and directed by Robert Snyder (Santa Barbara, CA: Masters & Masterworks, 1978), video, 28 minutes. ↩︎
Leah Ollman, “The Industrious Line,” Art in America, May 2007, 161. ↩︎
Ruth Asawa’s airy, hourglass-shaped sculptures appear to float in space, though they are suspended from the ceiling. Beginning in 1949, and created throughout her fifty-year career, Asawa's multi-lobed sculptures made of looped wire, like Untitled (S.035, Hanging Six-Lobed, Multilayered Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the Second, Fifth, and Sixth Lobes) (ca. 1962), defy categorization. They evoke traditional craft-like weaving and basketmaking, but their nonutilitarian forms demonstrate an interest in abstraction; their play with positive and negative space suggests both volume and weightlessness; and their attention to line, particularly evident in the shadows they cast, approaches drawing. The biomorphic forms and dimensionality of Asawa’s sculptures can be understood through the influence of both dance and architecture at Black Mountain College, where Asawa took rigorous design classes taught by Josef Albers, studied dance with choreographer Merce Cunningham,1 and met her husband, Albert Lanier, who became an architect. Though nonfigurative, the artist’s long, multi-lobed installations recall the proportions of the body and the built environment. While made up of a stable, rigid structure, their wavy and intertwining shapes are “vaguely anthropomorphic [in the] way they hold space, each one acting as an analogue for a human body.”2
Jennifer Gross, “Ruth Asawa: Dancers,” in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957, ed. Helen Molesworth (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2015), 366. ↩︎
Helen Molesworth, “Imaginary Landscape,” in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957, ed. Helen Molesworth (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2015), 25. ↩︎
Ruth Asawa was active in arts education and civic arts initiatives throughout her career, making several prominent public art pieces including the Japanese American Internment Memorial (1985–94) in San José. Asawa, with her family, had been imprisoned in 1942 at a camp in Rohwer, Arkansas.1 She designed a narrative monument with figurative imagery to depict the history of the Japanese American community in California before incarceration —stories of immigration, agriculture, small business, and culture—as well as experiences in the camps.2 On each end of the monument, pictorial scenes are framed by symbolic mon, or family crests that Asawa collected from 177 Japanese American families in San José. Cast in two large bronze panels, it stands as a five-by-fourteen-foot double-sided monument in front of the Federal Building in downtown San José.
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