Ruth Asawa - Drawing in Space
by Victoria Thomas
Ruth Asawa was a California-born artist who broke new artistic ground through her astonishing looped wire sculptures.
Although Asawa’s art suggests textiles, she never studied weaving or worked with fiber. She began creating with wire after visiting Mexico and admiring the handmade wire trays used in the local market to display eggs.
The artist grew up on her parents’ farm, and she traced her first artistic expression to her early childhood experiences of riding on the back of a horse-drawn wagon, dragging her bare toes across the soil surface to make the intriguing patterns she would later draw and sculpt with wire.
She found inspiration in nature, commenting, “These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”
She often described her work in botanical terms, referencing her “tree form” and “branching form” technique. Each piece typically began with a center “stem” of 200 to 1,000 wires, which she then divided and and tied into complex, biomorphic mobile structures.
Asawa likened her choice of medium -- industrial wire -- to medieval chain-mail. Coincidentally or not, wire is used create cages, barriers and fences, bringing to mind the shocking detention and captivity of 120,000 people of Japanese ethnicity, including the Asawa family, as part of FDR’s infamous Executive Order 9066 during WWII.
In 1942, her family was deliberately split and divided, and remained so for six years. The artist, her siblings and mother were incarcerated at the Santa Anita racetrack east of Los Angeles, while her father was sent to a prison camp in New Mexico.
The artist was released from the camps after completing high school, to continue her education. Her Japanese ethnicity prevented her from attending school in her native California, so the resourceful Asawa enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College. In her third year there, she was denied the opportunity to student-teach, allegedly for her own protection from anti-Japanese violence. Since classroom teaching experience was required for graduation, she left Milwaukee without her degree. She soon found her way to Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina, where she met her mentors, Bauhaus icon Josef Albers and dance innovator Merce Cunningham. There, she also met architect Albert Lanier, who would become her lifelong partner. Together, they raised six children.
Asawa maintained that she was never bitter about her experiences. She wrote, “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 a powerful arts activist. She tirelessly advocated for public arts programs including the landmark Alvarado Arts Workshop, as well as the San Francisco School of the Arts, which in 2010 was renamed in her honor.
She also created a number of prominent public art sculptures, notably the Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University. This installation consists of a haunting arrangement of 10 boulders, each representing one of America’s notorious Japanese prison camps.
Asawa’s work maintains an enduring sense of metaphor and mystery. Her airy, enigmatic vessels contain only light and breath, ritually expectant. Seemingly weightless and fragile in spite of their steely durability, they cast morphing shadows of exquisite delicacy. Although fabricated from nearly indestructible industrial materials, her creations are transparent, evoking both intimacy and a sense of alienation.
Asawa’s creations challenge and invite us to consider our own internal spaces, what we enclose within ourselves, and how we manifest to the outer world.
