31 Facts About Ruth Asawa

Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms.

At Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, Ruth Asawa learned drawing from illustrators interned at the camp.

In 1946, Ruth Asawa joined the avant-garde artistic community at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied under the influential German-American Bauhaus painter and color theorist Josef Albers, as well as the American architect and designer Buckminster Fuller.

At Black Mountain College, Ruth Asawa began making looped-wire sculptures inspired by basket crocheting technique she learned in 1947 during a trip to Mexico.

Ruth Asawa was the driving force behind the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.

Ruth Asawa's work is featured in collections at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, and was one of seven children.

For six months following, the Ruth Asawa family did not know if he was alive or dead.

Ruth Asawa was unable to return, as the US prevented entry even of American citizens from Japan.

Ruth Asawa was prevented from attending college on the California coast, as the war had continued and the zone of her intended college was still declared prohibited to ethnic Japanese, whether or not they were American citizens.

The summer before her final year in Milwaukee, Ruth Asawa traveled to Mexico with her older sister Lois.

Ruth Asawa attended an art class at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; among her teachers was Clara Porset, an interior designer from Cuba.

Ruth Asawa learned to use commonplace materials from Albers and began experimenting with wire, using a variety of techniques.

Ruth Asawa was particularly influenced by the summer sessions of 1946 and 1948, which featured courses by artist Jacob Lawrence, photography curator and historian Beaumont Newhall, Jean Varda, composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Willem de Kooning, sculptor Leo Amino, and R Buckminster Fuller.

In one class that included fellow student Rauschenberg Ruth Asawa reported that they ran down a large hill like it was a dance with flaming torches blasting Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

In contrast, Ruth Asawa described her experiences studying under Josef Albers as more formalist and what other students described as Fascist in demeanor and did not consider the feelings of his students in his teachings.

Ruth Asawa preferred to teach exploration and discover through design rather than the regurgitated freeloaded knowledge taught by other academics.

Ruth Asawa connected with this approach because of her family's cultural background and what she describes as an intolerance for emotion.

Ruth Asawa felt that she and her fellow students were ahead of the administration with developing their own form of modernism in sculpture, constantly trying new things.

Ruth Asawa began with basket designs, and later explored biomorphic forms that hung from the ceiling.

Ruth Asawa learned the wire-crocheting technique while on a trip to visit Josef Albers while he was on sabbatical in 1947 Toluca, Mexico, where villagers used a similar technique to make baskets from galvanized wire.

In 1962, Ruth Asawa began experimenting with tied wire sculptures of branching forms rooted in nature, which became increasingly geometric and abstract as she continued to work in that form.

Ruth Asawa experimented with electroplating, running the electric current in the "wrong" direction in order to create textural effects.

Ruth Asawa participated in the Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1965 as an artist.

Ruth Asawa installed her first public sculpture, Andrea, after dark in Ghirardelli Square, hoping to create the impression that it had always been there.

Ruth Asawa had a passionate commitment to and was an ardent advocate for art education as a transformative and empowering experience, especially for children.

Ruth Asawa helped co-found the Alvarado Arts Workshop for school children in 1968.

The Alvarado approach worked to integrate the arts and gardening, mirroring Ruth Asawa's own upbringing on a farm.

Ruth Asawa would go on to serve on the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976, and from 1989 to 1997 she served as a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In July 1949, Ruth Asawa married architect Albert Lanier, whom she met in 1947 at Black Mountain College.

Ruth Asawa died of natural causes on August 5,2013, at her San Francisco home at the age of 87.