Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)
Untitled (S. 152), 1962
Copper wire
On loan from the collection of Michael ’85 and Alison Hall Mauzé ‘84
Ruth Asawa, born in 1926 to Japanese immigrants, started life in California as the middle child of seven. Her parents were farmers, and she started working on the farm before and after school at the age of six. Growing up through the Great Depression, Asawa already had a difficult life on top of the discrimination she faced as a Japanese American. When World War II started, Asawa and the rest of her family were placed into internment camps in Arkansas. After leaving the internment camp in 1943, Asawa finished her senior year of high school, serving as the arts editor of her high school yearbook. Still facing discrimination after the war at the Milwaukee State Teachers College, Asawa was encouraged by friends to attend the summer session at the experimental Black Mountain College outside of Asheville, NC.
Attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946 to 1949, Asawa was instructed by influential teachers like Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky. Not only taking classes in design and drawing, Asawa also took classes from dancer Merce Cunningham and architect Buckminster Fuller. This experimental, hands-on education and creative community affected Asawa profoundly, and she used her experience in art classes to apply them to arts education. Asawa later moved to San Francisco, where she became highly involved in arts education and activism while continuing her artistic practice. Her work with children emphasized using cast aside objects, increasing abstract problem solving while making students aware of their surroundings.
The piece on view in the art history office shows one style of her expansive oeuvre of wire-based works. Hanging from the ceiling, three large, grouped wires make up the top center portion of the work, and they are attached to four large wire groupings. Extending out from these groupings are branches, which seem to bear hostile prickling sticks protruding from all sides. Tiny wires, wrapping around the splitting of the wires, provide support for the bundles and bring to mind barbed wire but also vines that wrap around stems for support. Asawa’s work was mostly based in organic forms she observed, whether it was in drawing, large, looped wire sculptures, or in root-like sculptures like this one. Taking large gauge wire, she split the wire into small fractal sections, which split into smaller fractal sections. Asawa was given the idea to construct wire sculpture in this way when a friend gave her a desert plant from Death Valley to draw. Finding this shrub easier to sculpt in wire than to draw, Asawa created these branching sculptures reminiscent of root systems or corals. Discussing these tied-wire works as an exploration of branching forms, the works show that “the relation between outside and inside was interdependent, integral.” The rhizomatic form of this work shows her lifelong exploration of not only the organic forms which surrounded her, but also the painstaking crafting of drawing unique forms of wire in space.
Looking back at her time at Black Mountain College, her practice transitioned to creating loop-wired forms, for which she is most well-known. During her time there, she took time to visit Mexico, and similar to her instructors Anni Albers, Josef Albers, and Charles Olson, Asawa was interested in the craft and design of Mexico. An old narrative of the development of her work lies in her trip to Toluca, Mexico, where the woven baskets there inspired her loop-wired forms. This theory is upheld and mentioned in much scholarly work about her art, including works about Black Mountain College and on her own website. Recent scholarship has indicated that her work lies more in the intersection of craft, experiment, and organic forms. These forms, not only just an exploration of material, are also an exploration of the inside and outside, and how humans interpret space. A retrospective of her work at the de Young Museum in San Francisco was titled Contours in the Air, which emphasizes her focus on investigating space and form as they intersect. Much of her drawings were abstract investigation of line through space, and her sculptures can be considered an imagining of these linear forms in the air. Recognizing the importance of craft as it intersects with fine art, Asawa’s work paved the way for a generation of art which relied on techniques of craft like textiles or ceramics.
Looking at the form of this Asawa piece, a viewer can see her investigation in form and material. The process of twisting the wire and meticulously separating the pieces leads to this branching structure. The root-like form extends out from the center into countless tendrils. The piece is at the same time an investigation into organic forms which surround us, the material of wire and its malleability, and the space which it branches into and inhabits. Ruth Asawa’s work, heavily valued and acclaimed today, shows her role in the shift of contemporary art, even in the face of heavy discrimination.
— Brown Payne ’24