Making Their Mark 6

A CELEBRATION OF GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS

Innovative sculptor Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) helped redefine mid-century American sculpture. The technique she first developed in the 1950s became her signature style: suspended, amorphous forms made from thousands of interconnected wire pieces. Born in Norwalk, California, Asawa was the daughter of Japanese immigrants who ran a truck farm. During World War II she, along with her mother and siblings (and thousands of other citizens of Japanese descent), were placed in an internment camp, first in a makeshift facility in California, then at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in (her father was sent to a similar camp in ). Despite the injustice of her internment, Asawa harbored no resentment afterwards, instead maintaining that the experience helped shape her Ruth Asawa, Untitled, c.1960-63. Oxidized copper and Ruth Asawa in 1952, holding one of her wire pieces. identity. She used the eighteen months she spent in the brass wire, 94 x 17 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches. Photograph by Imogen Cunningham. © The Imogen camps to make art, after befriending a number of Disney Cunningham Trust. animators who had also been interred.

Allowed to leave Rohwer in 1943, she attended college in Michigan, intending to become a teacher. An art class taken during a summer trip to Mexico, however, changed her life and career aspirations, and she enrolled at in North Carolina. During its twenty-four years of existence , Black Mountain College offered hands-on instruction from a faculty roster that included , Josef and Anni Albers, , Willem de Kooning and . The school prioritized process over final product, and students were encouraged to experiment; it was there that Asawa first began to use wire as a medium.

Ruth Asawa's 1943 photo identification card, authorizing On a second trip to Mexico in 1947, she learned to crochet wire from local artisans, who used her to leave the Rohwer War Relocation Center. the technique to create baskets. Asawa saw the potential for wire to create drawings in space, and eventually for creating forms within forms, in long strands of expanded lobes. By the 1950s she was exhibiting her w ire sculptures in major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Asawa's abstract forms explored volumes in space, and volumes within volumes. Vaguely biomorphic, her creations were of their time, suggesting the abstract forms of contemporary painting as well as the so-called Atomic Age Design of the late 1940s-1960s; yet there is an otherworldly quality to her sculptures that defies temporality.

In the 1960s Ruth Asawa became involved in arts activism in the San Francisco area. She co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop (1968), designed to teach the arts to children, which would influence similar programs across the country. Her long- fought campaign for an alternative high school resulted in the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts (1982). In 2010

the school was renamed the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in Ruth Asawa posed with one of her wire sculptures. honor of this pioneering artist and arts advocate. Photograph by Imogen Cunningham. © The Imogen Installation view of wire sculptures by Ruth Asawa. Cunningham Trust.

KAM CELEBRATES WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH