“An artist is not special. “An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”
— Ruth Asawa
The groundbreaking work of Ruth Asawa opened Saturday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is the first major national and international museum retrospective of the artist. This first posthumous exhibition features the entire spectrum of Asawa’s work including sculpture, drawings, prints, paintings, design objects, and archival material from U.S.-based public and private collections.
A creative universe
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective provides an extensive look into the artist’s output and inspiration, exploring the ways her longtime San Francisco home and garden served as the epicenter for her creative universe. Asawa ceaselessly transformed ordinary objects into art while seamlessly integrating teaching and advocacy for public art into her practice. Her groundbreaking wire sculptures and experimental works redefined art as a process and a way of being versus art that has a traditional beginning and end.
Born in Norwalk, Calif., in 1926 and raised on a farm, Asawa possessed an early connection with nature, which she drew upon later in her creative process. In 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were unjustly displaced to internment camps, along with many others of Japanese descent, in the wake of Executive Order 9066. At one of the camps, she studied with artists from Walt Disney, and later became the art editor for her high school yearbook.
After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C. She flourished under the tutelage of teachers including Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Max Dehn. In this environment she began creating her trademark artworks with undulating lines, repeating patterns, and studies of positive and negative space that would resonate in later work. The exhibition features ephemera from Asawa’s 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico during which she learned a looped-wire technique used for basketry that would help define her sculptural practice.
The San Francisco years
Asawa moved from North Carolina to San Francisco in 1949 where she would remain for the remainder of her life. A gallery devoted to 1950s San Francisco reveals a decade of her tremendous productivity and growth. During this period she created her hanging looped-wire sculptures, with forms within forms and interlocking lobes, no two alike, for which she became known worldwide.
In 1962, Asawa received a gift of a desert plant that inspired her next major body of work: tied-wire sculptures, some wall-mounted, some suspended, and some displayed on the floor. An adjacent gallery includes Asawa’s designs for commercial projects including fabric patterns and wallpaper. All of these forms possess a common continuum of undulating imagery, fabric, wallpaper, and wire sculptures demonstrating the same evolution influenced by the artist’s love of nature and the methodical organic movement of growth.
Noe Valley home recreated
The exhibition features a gallery evoking the Noe Valley home and studio that was the hub of the artist’s creative and family life for more than half a century, from the early 1960s until her death in 2013. A grouping of wire sculptures of various forms and sizes that Asawa hung from the rafters of her home are shown together with a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and examples of her material experiments in clay, copper, electroplating, and bronze. Highlights include Asawa’s original hand-carved redwood doors from the house, which she engaged her children to help with, and works she displayed by other artists, including Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, Peggy Tolk-Watkins, Imogen Cunningham, and Marguerite Wildernhain.
Asawa ‘lived her values in everything she did, modeling the importance of the arts and opening up creative opportunities for others at every turn,’ said cocurator Janet Bishop.
A life entwined
Asawa’s art was inseparable from her attitude toward art advocacy and public sculpture practices from the 1960s forward. She was dedicated to arts education and emphasized it was essential to learn by doing. As a longtime member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, she was instrumental in developing the San Francisco School of the Arts, a public high school that opened in 1982, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.
Video, photographs, maquettes, and archival materials in the exhibition illuminate Asawa’s public art including fountains at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square (Andrea, 1968) and Union Square (San Francisco Fountain, 1973).
Cocurator Janet Bishop said, “Not only was Asawa an exceptionally talented artist — among the most distinguished sculptors of the 20th century and major contributor in so many other mediums — but she lived her values in everything she did, modeling the importance of the arts and opening up creative opportunities for others at every turn.”
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective will be on display through Sept. 2.
