Ruth Asawa Retrospective at SFMOMA

SFMOMA is presenting a huge retrospective this summer of artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), an important artist in San Franciscan and American history.

She was born into a large Japanese-American farming family in Southern California which was sent to an internment camp in Arkansas during World War Two. She was later quoted about the experience: "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."

On a trip to Mexico in her last year of Teachers College, she took an art class taught by Cuban designer Clara Porset, a friend of artist Joseph Albers. In a 1981 interview Asawa stated, "I was told that it might be difficult for me, with the memories of the war still fresh, to work in a public school. My life might even be in danger. This was a godsend, because it encouraged me to follow my interest in art, and I subsequently enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina." (Pictured is Untitled, Abstraction [Dogwood Leaves], 1946-1949.)

The post-war avant-garde arts college in North Carolina was in the midst of an historic moment, with an extraordinary roster of students and teachers that included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and R. Buckminster Fuller. The experience was transformational for Asawa. She also met her husband, architect Albert Lanier, at the college and they moved to Noe Valley in San Francisco, since the only states where interracial marriage was legal were California and Washington. Along the way, they proceeded to have six children together. (Pictured is Untitled [Wall-mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes], 1953.)

Asawa's work uses the humblest of materials, from rubber stamps to sticks and leaves and folded paper, that is intricate, obsessive and inspirational.

During a 1947 visit to Toluca, Mexico, she became fascinated with the way villagers made baskets from galvanized wire, and the inspiration for her looped-wire sculptures was ignited. She stated: "I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It's still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere."

In the 1950s and 1960s, her hanging wire sculptures became emblematic midcentury modern images, and were quite successful in the art market.

One room of the exhibit is a recreation of the family's bohemian Noe Valley house, an Arts and Crafts treasure that looks like a huge, all-encompassing art project.

According to Asawa's granddaughter Lilli Lanier, who grew up nearby, "She always had an idea. Come over tomorrow. We're going to draw eggplants. And then we're going to eat them. We'd draw food...and then it would turn into a cooking lesson--how you make Japanese noodles with cilantro and the eggplants you've just drawn." (Pictured is Untitled, Eggplants on Orange Background, 1958.)

In a post on The San Francisco Standard, Erin Feher makes the case that one of Asawa's greatest contributions was her dedication to childrens' arts education (click here). She begins: "Ruth Asawa couldn’t hide her rising anger. As her youngest son, Paul, proudly showed off the hand-traced turkey drawing he had completed at school, Asawa was taken aback. It was autumn 1967, and Paul attended Alvarado Elementary, just down the block from their Noe Valley home...To Asawa, who had studied with Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers, and Willem de Kooning, the turkey was an abomination. Asawa acted swiftly, rounding up a small cohort of fellow mothers and PTA members to elevate the arts program at the school. Calling themselves the “Valley Girls,” they scrounged up $50 in donations and launched an experimental summer school in the cafeteria, run completely by volunteers. Students were taught to weave on looms made from packing crates and to make sculptures from papier-mâché."...“My mom was a bulldozer. The things she really wanted, she got them done,” says Paul Lanier, the creator of that maligned turkey art.

The retrospective will be traveling to MOMA in New York and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, so check it out this summer while you have a chance.