"Ruth Asawa rarely missed a chance to loop others into her work. At Black Mountain College, she would wake before dawn to rouse Josef Albers, the Bauhaus color theorist, so that they could watch the sun rise through the fog on the hills. At seventeen, in a Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas, she sketched caricatures of her fellow-detainees. Some of her signature wire sculptures-diaphanous, undulating forms, like chain-mail invertebrates-were made with the help of her sons and daughters."
"Long esteemed in the art world and a local hero in San Francisco, Asawa has lately become a national figure, both for her sculptural inventions-burnished by our era's nostalgia for mid-century-modern minimalism-and for the arc of her life. A Whitney show in 2019 returned her to prominence, and that same year saw the release of a children's book about her. More recently, she was honored with a crater on Mercury."
Ruth Asawa fused communal life and art through collaborative processes, domestic objects, and public projects. She made observational sketches during internment, cultivated relationships at Black Mountain College, and involved family and children in making and designing works. Her signature wire sculptures are delicate, undulating, and constructed with community participation. Public commissions, notably the 1970 Union Square fountain, enlisted broad civic involvement. Posthumous recognition expanded her reach, including a Whitney exhibition, a children's book, a Mercury crater honor, and a major retrospective of over three hundred works that traveled from SFMoMA to MoMA, accompanied by photographs and home keepsakes.
Read at The New Yorker
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