Ruth Asawa’s Retrospective of Looped Wires

On display are not just sculptures but drawings, paintings, paper folds, masks, redwood doors hand-carved in a curly meander, and baker’s clay sculptures made from flour, water, and salt– a medium she invented for her kids. 

Asawa’s first big lesson in life was when her family was interned during World War II. A teenager at the time, she witnessed the arrest of her father who was taken from their Southern California farm in 1942. It was six years before she saw him again. The rest of the family spent the next five months in Santa Anita where Asawa learned drawing from a pair of Disney illustrators, also imprisoned. From there, the family was shipped to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas for a year. 

Graduating from the camp school, she intended to become a teacher, but laws prevented Japanese-Americans from doing so. She attended art school instead, at North Carolina’s famed Black Mountain College under the tutelage of celebrated Bauhaus abstract artist and color theoretician Joseph Albers. One of his assignments was to bend a piece of wire, using its line to contour shapes in space. Asawa saw in it the opportunity to create three-dimensional line drawings.

“She didn’t grow up in a creative household. Work was the number one priority,” notes co-curator Janet Bishop, who collaborated with Cara Manes at MoMA where the show travels in the fall. Asawa studied dance under Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain and learned design from Buckminster Fuller, just two of the illustrious faculty that, at the time, also included John Cage and Willem de Kooning. 

“One of the exercises Albers taught was the meander– the curve meander, the Greek meander, the constant back and forth between positive and negative,” says Bishop, noting a theme consistent with his geometric abstractions. “That layering and transparency that appears in Albers’ work and in the Asawa sculptures, it's fascinating to look at them side by side. In her, he found his star pupil.” 

On a trip Asawa took to Mexico before graduating, she learned a basket weaving technique based on looped wires. Moving to San Francisco in 1949 with her new husband, fellow grad and architect Albert Lanier, she found immediate success, including works placed in a 1953 issue of Vogue magazine. 

The following year, she participated in SFMOMA’s all-women Four Artist-Craftsmen, blurring the line between art and craft by employing techniques associated with the latter to achieve effects linked with the former. In addition to SFMOMA, her looped-wire sculptures appeared in several major venues throughout the decade, including the Whitney Biennial and the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial.

In the 1950s, SFMOMA hosted the San Francisco Art Association Annual, an open submission jury-chosen competition. Asawa submitted a looped-wire sculpture. “The controversy was whether or not it could be defined as sculpture, cause it couldn't stand up on its own,” notes Bishop. “They weren’t like statues. That was a new concept, ‘Could a sculpture hang from the ceiling?’ Her work was so innovative, so much her own, people hadn’t seen things like it before. In some cases, people had to wrap their heads around what it was.”

Asawa was mistakenly sent an acceptance letter by the jury, who meant to deny her. When they realized their error, they reassessed the work and decided to accept her. 

The sculptures began with varying gauges and wire types including copper, iron, brass, and steel. A wire was shaped into a continuous line of looped e’s. Attaching a similarly shaped wire, Asawa started to build her form. She usually worked without a plan, starting from the top or bottom or middle and working outward, letting the composition dictate its own shape, choosing to “trust the medium.” 

Essential to her process was family and community. A mother of six, she made her home the center of her practice and devised activities to engage her children, such as sculpting in baker’s clay, paper folds, or drawing. Underwhelmed with the arts program at school, she and her friends lobbied for funding for children’s art programs. Later, she served on the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in 1968, bringing professional artists into city schools. And, in 1982, she was the engine behind a public arts high school, later renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor.

“Asawa never made money teaching art. She did so much work in the schools, and it’s because she felt strongly about cultivating tactile intelligence, and that art adds value to our lives,” says Bishop. “In some interviews, she said she thought her biggest contribution was her work in the school.” 

Her public projects include Aurora, a circular bronze fountain framing San Francisco Bay, and the Andrea fountain at Ghirardelli Square. Depicting a mermaid holding a baby, it was modeled after Asawa’s friend, Andrea Jepson, who was breastfeeding at the time. It sits in contrast to her Japantown fountain of bronze, modeled from an origami flower. 

Her San Francisco State University Garden of Remembrance, a landscape sculpture of stones and flora, honors the legacy of Japanese-Americans, like herself, who were incarcerated during World War II. The San Francisco Fountain at Union Square comprises 41 panels of everyday city scenes molded by over 250 local citizens from baker’s clay then cast in bronze. Its esthetic cousin, the Japanese-American Internment Memorial, sits outside the Federal Building in San Jose. Among the depictions on it is the arrest of Asawa’s father. 

That she wasn’t embittered by the treatment of her family at the hands of the government is suggested by the fact that she remained a citizen and lived out her years in the U.S. Friends came and went freely at the Asawa house in the Noe Valley section of San Francisco, many of them artists, like photographer Imogen Cunningham whose archive of the artist at work is unparalleled. Most would acquiesce to Asawa’s request to make a mask of their face, which she hung on the wall outside the front door, so she could be greeted by her friends when returning home. 

 “One of the chief ways in which she made her mark is the emphasis on the importance of art for everyone,” notes Bishop, who had the pleasure of meeting the artist before her death in 2013. “She was such an exemplary human being and truly a unique talent. If people don’t like Ruth Asawa, something’s wrong with them.”