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Business Mayor
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Mayor
A Landmark Exhibition Explores Ruth Asawa's Creative Legacy Over Six Decades
'An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special,' reads a quote from Japanese American modernist artist Ruth Asawa at the entry corridor to her first posthumous retrospective, on view through September 2 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Organized in 12 galleries that unfold in loose chronological progression over six decades, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective features over 300 works, including her signature hanging looped-wire sculptures, as well as lesser-known creations, like her 1940s paintings and drawings of flowers from the '90s and early 2000s. Asawa was born in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents and raised on a farm in Norwalk, California. As a teenager, she and her family were separated and displaced in 1942, unjustly relocated to incarceration camps as a result of the U.S. government's Executive Order 9066 during World War II. After the war ended, Asawa traveled to rural North Carolina and enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College (BMC), where from 1946 to 1949 she studied under teachers including Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Max Dehn. 'Each instructor was a practicing artist, dancer, musician, or mathematician, who understood his craft by doing it,' Asawa once said of her time at BMC. Inspired by dance classes Asawa took with Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College, the Dancers motif seen above (oil on paper, 1948-49) is one of several abstractions of dancing figures Asawa produced, highlighting her exploration of physical motion. The interlocking forms hint at her development of nesting and layering techniques in future sculptural work. Her diverse coursework in art and design—as well as mathematics and dance—inspired her early drawings, paintings, and wire work, but it was a foundational 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, that exposed Asawa to basket weaving with wire, a key inflection point that would critically influence the looped-wire technique that characterized her forthcoming sculptural work. The gallery encompassing Asawa's time at BMC showcases works dominated by bold colors and patterns, a reflection of her studies in color theory and her early experimentations with biomorphic forms that marked this period. It was also during this formative era that Asawa met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier. In one corner, a postmarked envelope from Lanier addressed to Asawa at 'B.M.C.' is displayed with the 1948 painting she made using the stamp colors. Read More Arche acoustic pod by Marouane Sadki for Leet Design In 1949, Asawa joined Lanier in San Francisco, and the city became their adopted hometown. It was there during the 1950s that Asawa honed her hanging looped-wire sculptures with her 'form within a form' nesting technique and interlocking lobes. In an expansive gallery dedicated to these abstract wire forms, sculptures of varying sizes hang individually and in groupings, creating shadows on the white gallery walls almost as intricate as the sculptures themselves. Asawa learned the pivotal looped-wire weaving technique approach that she would later apply to her hanging sculptures on a 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico. Asawa and Lanier had six children between 1950 and 1959, and the family moved to a cedar-shingled Arts and Crafts–style home in Noe Valley (where the couple lived for the rest of their lives). Although they renovated the home to incorporate a separate art studio, Asawa preferred to work in the living room—taking advantage of the double-height ceilings to suspend her wire sculptures from the rafters above. 'I've always had my studio in the house,' Asawa said, 'because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me—or a peanut butter sandwich.' A gallery with wood-paneled walls—a departure from the white walls of the surrounding spaces—represents the Asawa-Lanier residence, with the size and scale of the space akin to their original Noe Valley living room. The exhibition includes the redwood doors formerly installed at the home's entrance, hand-carved in 1961 by Asawa and family members. Wire sculptures are suspended from the ceiling just as they were in Asawa's cathedral-like living room. Exhibition visitors are invited to pull up a chair and imagine the home as it looked as Asawa worked and raised her family there. Read More Can Video Games Improve Doctors' Decision-Making? One of the Ruth Asawa: Retrospective galleries evokes the living room of the Noe Valley home where Asawa and Lanier raised their six children in San Francisco—and from where Asawa often worked. Rough sketches of bananas and tomatoes—many of them on display in original spiral notebooks—and watercolor drawings of eggplants, cherries, chrysanthemums, and calla lilies reveal the artist's love of gardening and are also featured prominently in the Noe Valley gallery. Another gallery hones in on Asawa's focus on flowers from the 1980s into the early 2000s, with soft watercolors and black-and-white drawings of bouquets given to her by friends and family. Asawa, pictured in 1954, works on a large-scale sculpture. Elsewhere, through video, photographs, maquettes, and archival materials, the exhibition shines a light on Asawa's public artworks in the Bay Area from the 1960s onward, as well as her fierce advocacy for integrating art into San Francisco's public schools. 'It is especially meaningful to debut Asawa's first national and international retrospective in her adopted home city of San Francisco,' says Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family chief curator at SFMOMA, who co-curated the exhibition with Cara Manes of MoMA, New York (where the touring exhibition will head this fall). 'She left her mark all over the city in the form of her public works.' This early-1990s drawing of a bouquet from Anni Albers represents Asawa's continued exploration of flowers and the natural world. Walking through Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, room after room, shines a light on the rich variety of Asawa's oeuvre. 'Asawa was always making, always learning through doing,' says Bishop. 'By representing the full breadth and depth of her practice, we're hoping visitors will see for themselves how inventive she was across two and three dimensions, at a range of scales, and in a wide variety of materials.' Top image: Ruth Asawa and her granddaughter in front of her Japanese American Internment Memorial, 1990-94, commissioned by the City of San José; ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner; photo: Laurence Cuneo READ SOURCE
San Francisco Chronicle
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco lauds Ruth Asawa in stunning SFMOMA homecoming
There's a moment in 'Ruth Asawa: Retrospective' that overwhelmed me as an admirer of the San Francisco artist. Turning the corner in the fourth-floor galleries, I entered a space designed to evoke the living room of Asawa's Noe Valley home, where she lived with her husband, architect Albert Lanier, and their six children, from 1961 until her death. Aged wood and a sense of lived-in warmth put me in the center of Asawa's work as an artist, mother and arts education advocate. The house, where Asawa also kept her studio, was a center of family, community and her arts education advocacy. Dominating the far wall is a photo from 1969 by Rondal Patridge of the room in all its working beauty. Asawa's daughter Addie Lanier and son Paul Lanier and neighborhood kids sit at a large table, baker's clay figures in the foreground. The family dog, Henry, sits in a child's lap. Among the art in the picture are examples of the hanging, looped-wire sculptures for which Asawa is best known. Several of those same sculptures now hang above visitors in the gallery, high enough that you can walk under and stare up into them. 'It was definitely emotional for everybody,' said Henry Weverka, the president of Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. As Asawa's grandson, he knows that room intimately. 'I think that picture encapsulates my childhood and who my grandmother was.' Janet Bishop, the chief curator of SFMOMA and co-curator of 'Ruth Asawa' with Cara Manes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called the living room gallery a testament to the 'seamlessness' of Asawa's life and work. More Information 'It was important to me not to create an artificial separation between Asawa's studio practice and her family life,' said Bishop. 'The house was an epicenter of her production.' 'Ruth Asawa Retrospective" has been in the works for five years and contains more than 300 objects. It is the (overdue) celebration the artist merits. Asawa (1926-2013) remains an enormous presence in San Francisco, with a large concentration of her numerous public projects in the Bay Area found here. Since her death there have been multiple smaller shows of her work across the globe. 'Asawa has had this tremendous resurgence, but my aunts, uncles and my mother have been working at this for 65 years now,' said Weverka, the son of Addie. 'They were the ones who were helping with her public commissions, coiling wire with her in the 1950s, starting to tell her story long before she passed away.' Asawa spent her childhood in Norwalk (Los Angeles County) the fourth of seven children born to Japanese immigrant farmers. Riding on the back of her father's tractor, she would drag her feet in the dirt and watch the curved, symmetrical shapes they would make in the dust. Asawa's daughter Aiko Cuneo said that farm life was one of the experiences that gave Asawa the discipline and work ethic that became central to her art. In 1942, Asawa and her family were incarcerated by the United States as part of Executive Order 9022, the Japanese Internment policy during World War II. Her family was taken to a camp in Rohwer, Ark., but her father was separated from the family and taken to a different camp. To have this exhibition mounted now, as the government again forcibly removes immigrants and their families from their homes is a dark parallel that hangs in the air like one of Asawa's sculptures. But it's also a show filled with beauty, and Asawa's life is a testimony to the triumph of hope and creativity over fear and division. 'Retrospective' begins by tracing Asawa's time at Black Mountain College in North Carolina following her incarceration where she studied with Josef Albers, his wife textile and printmaker Anni Albers, and geodesic dome pioneer Buckminster Fuller (who designed Asawa's sterling silver river rock wedding ring, which is on view.) Asawa's early fascination with repetition is on display in her 'Meandering' drawings, and the organic shapes that would define her sculptures, most notably on an untitled 1948-49 cut paper on plywood work. There's also her earliest experiments with wire using the basket making technique she learned on a 1947 trip to Mexico, beginning with the looped wire basket in which the Albers kept their mail from 1948-49. 'Her experience at Black Mountain was profound, there were so many ways in which it clicked for her, tapping into her natural resourcefulness and openness to using any sorts of materials,' said Bishop. In 1949, Asawa married fellow Black Mountain College student Lanier in San Francisco, and the 1950s began one of the most productive periods of her life. She not only gave birth to four of the family's six children (two are adopted), but she also began creating the hanging looped wire sculptures that are among her signatures. The galleries with suspended works from that same era feel like walking under the sea amid kelp and creatures of the deep. To see so many of these sculptures at once shows the variety of shape, color wire (from black to copper and gold) as well as the repetition of motifs. Explorations of Asawa's public commissions also feature in the show, including the famed 'San Francisco Fountain' in Union Square from 1973, with figures formed in bakers' clay by Asawa and students from the Alvarado School Arts Workshop then cast in bronze (a touchable test panel is on display), and the nursing mermaid 'Andrea's Fountain' from 1968 in Ghiradelli Square. The connections to Asawa's arts education advocacy and motherhood are easily apparent. Some of Asawa's bronze and clay masks of friends and family members are on display, along with casts of Weverka's hands and feet. A garden on a terrace overlooking Third Street is meant to remind people of the importance of Lanier and Asawa's Noe Valley garden as part of her work, and it sets the stage for the wall mounted and standing tied wire sculptures that echo branches, trees and flowers. Likewise, Asawa's watercolors of fruit, vegetables and flowers, and the botanical drawings from the last decades of her life. In so many of these works on paper, the organic, connecting shapes of the looped wire sculptures still feel ever-present. 'Everything is completely connected,' said Weverka. 'To understand the origins of her work and where she went with it, so many years later, and her continuous exploration of material and form and motif is important. Everything starts from the center and moves outward, and the connectivity across all mediums is always there.'
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ruth Asawa's Astonishing Universe Began at Her Door
If you passed through the unlocked gate and rambling garden into Ruth Asawa's Noe Valley home between 1966 and 2000, the 5-foot-tall Japanese American artist would likely have persuaded you to lie down on the kitchen table or living room floor and let her cover your face in plaster. Ethereal clusters of her undulating, looped-wire sculptures would have dangled from the rafters of the cathedral ceiling while her six children, and later 10 grandchildren, ran underfoot. 'Ruthie could get people to do very bizarre things — because to have your face cast is a completely intimate act,' said Addie Lanier, one of Asawa's five surviving children. Addie's son, Henry Weverka, who also had his hands and feet cast by his grandmother throughout childhood, and now oversees her estate, added, 'She said she liked capturing a moment in time.' In the last 35 years of the 20th century, inspired by a Life magazine essay picturing Roman masks and busts, Asawa cast the faces of at least 600 people. They included neighborhood children as well as her mentor, the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, an influential teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s and to Albert Lanier, the 6-foot-5 architecture student from Georgia whom she met and married while studying there. Asawa, who died in 2013 at age 87, hung her ever-expanding constellation of life masks on the ceder-shingled facade of their Arts & Crafts style home in a dramatically inclusive gesture of welcome. 'If she asked you to do something, no one ever said no,' said Andrea Jepson, Asawa's former neighbor who let the artist cast her whole body shortly after giving birth in 1967 as the model for 'Andrea,' a bronze mermaid fountain in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square. Jepson recalls the house being 'filled with other people all the time. Nothing was compartmentalized.' On the eve of Asawa's first posthumous retrospective, opening April 5 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Addie and Henry joined Paul Lanier, Asawa's youngest child, who now lives in the family home, for a personal tour of Asawa's creative universe, where artmaking, family life and community activism flowed together. The house is nested within a garden created by Albert. 'A lot of times she worked right here,' Paul said, pointing to a discreet hook at the center of a double-wide door frame between the living room and kitchen, where Asawa would hang her looped-wire works in process. She used a knit stitch by hand, which she learned from a local wire-basket maker on a 1947 trip to Mexico, to draw in space and define volumes with a continuous line of pliable copper, brass or steel. 'She could sit, or she might have to lie down,' Paul said, as the scale of her curvaceous forms grew, adding that it was a convenient spot to monitor what was cooking for dinner. At the long butcher block kitchen table built by Albert, Asawa led group sessions sculpting figures from homemade baker's clay (a mixture of flour, salt and water), or decorating eggs or making origami by day and family meals by night. 'The most important thing to this family was that we sat down to dinner together every single night,' Asawa once told an interviewer. 'There were eight of us at the table, plus friends.' The retrospective, organized with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it travels this fall, will emphasize the Noe Valley home and garden as the center of Asawa's world, said Janet Bishop, the exhibition's co-curator and SFMOMA's chief curator. A gallery at the museum will display an array of Asawa's life masks adjacent to a set of redwood doors — formerly installed at the home's entrance. These majestic doors were hand-carved in 1961 by Asawa and family members with a stylized wave pattern, echoing Black Mountain assignments that explored a meandering line. The exhibition will also shine a light on Asawa's public artworks, including in San Francisco's Union Square, Embarcadero and Japantown that are not widely known outside the city, and on her fierce advocacy for integrating art into the city's public schools. A local legend, Asawa nonetheless had zero visibility in the broader art world during her lifetime. She was rejected all four times that she applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. But as distinctions between art and craft have dissolved and artists long overlooked because of their race or gender are being reappraised, Asawa's looped-wire forms have been widely acclaimed for transforming a utilitarian material and innovating on techniques that added buoyancy and transparency in sculpture. 'She's become a darling within the museum world and also with younger artists sharing images of her work all over social media,' said Jonathan Laib, director at the David Zwirner Gallery, which has mounted four solo Asawa exhibitions since 2017, regularly selling out. In 2023, the Whitney Museum and Menil Collection organized the first Asawa exhibition to examine the primacy of drawings in her practice, influenced by the former Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Laib had never heard of Asawa until he was working at Christie's in 2008 and received a cold call from Asawa's daughter Addie. She was interested in selling an Albers painting, a gift he inscribed to her mother, to raise money to provide the 24-hour care she needed late in life. 'That Albers painting at the time was really the only artwork of value that the family had,' said Laib, who was stunned by images Addie sent of Asawa's sculptures and quickly flew to San Francisco to see them in person. In 2010, Laib put a six-lobed, multilayered hanging wire sculpture from the late '60s, consigned by Asawa's family, in a Christie's sale alongside artists she showed with at New York's Peridot Gallery in the 1950s, including Philip Guston and Louise Bourgeois. 'I wanted to reinsert her into the conversation,' Laib said. It sold for $578,500, with more than 30 bidders, smashing Asawa's previous auction high of under $100,000. 'It kicked off what we see now, which is just a complete transformation of her presence in the art world,' said Laib, who brought her estate to Zwirner in 2017. He estimated that the sculpture today would be insured for at least $8 million. Laib also brokered the private sale to SFMOMA of a circa 1958 sculpture in the months after Asawa's death, enabling Paul to keep their Noe Valley home. (His siblings all live within a mile.) Bishop, the curator, said the piece is her favorite in the museum's collection, noting that such works were described dismissively by one critic early on as 'earrings for a giraffe.' In 1956, the critic Dore Ashton wrote in The New York Times, 'They are beautiful if primarily only decorative objects in space.' The Portuguese sculptor Leonor Antunes, who often uses wire in her work, found a visit to Asawa's Noe Valley home inspirational while she was working on her own 2016 installation for SFMOMA. 'It was quite extraordinary to imagine her working within her family context and weaving in space with this hard material that has its own memory,' Antunes said. 'It's not elastic. You have to be very persistent in creating the kind of even structures that she did.' Addie described her mother's 'relentless' hands. 'She was exhausting as a mother because her energy was so profound,' said Addie, who would coil wire for her or feed her two lengths at a time for the branching forms she began making in 1962, modeled on a desert plant. 'But she didn't ask you to do anything she wasn't doing,' she added. 'We were workers on the farm.' Asawa's life started on a farm southwest of Los Angeles where she was one of seven children of Japanese immigrant parents. She and her siblings did farm work before and after school, in early morning, late nights and on Sundays. Saturdays they studied Japanese, including calligraphy. 'We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment,' Asawa told an interviewer in 2001. 'We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within the forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.' In 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Asawa, age 16, and her family were among more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent — mostly American citizens — held by the government in internment camps. For six months, Asawa slept in a horse stall at a converted racetrack in Santa Anita, Calif., and was tutored for six hours a day by three detained Disney animators who taught the children how to draw. 'You have to say for her it was a mixed blessing,' Addie said. Asawa was transferred to Rohwer, Ark., where Quakers running the relocation camp let her continue her education at Milwaukee State Teachers College, and she learned about the interdisciplinary utopian college in Black Mountain. Beginning there in 1946, she met Albert 'on a mountain path,' he recalled in 2002. In a 1948 letter to him, Asawa called herself a 'citizen of the universe,' refusing to be defined by race or trauma. They married in 1949 with Albers's approval. (Both families initially objected to the interracial union, which was then illegal in all but two states, California and Washington.) In 1948, Asawa took classes at Black Mountain with the dancer Merce Cunningham and wrote to Albert that 'dance is joy, longing, crying, laughing, everything.' She translated this spirit into paintings and drawings of dancers — floating abstracted figure-eight forms, nipped at the center, with 'arms' and 'legs' arcing around spherical heads and bodies. In the retrospective, a selection of these works underscore how she extended this mode of thinking into her three-dimensional wire sculptures, which in 1952 she began calling 'continuous form within a form.' Cara Manes, MoMA's associate curator and a co-organizer, sees this concept as a 'manifesto' for her entire practice. 'She worked with this form for the rest of her life,' Manes said, 'exploring its iterative potential across a host of single- and multi-lobed sculptures, drawings and paintings.' Between 1950 and 1959, living in San Francisco, Asawa gave birth to six children and produced ambitious multi-lobed hanging sculptures for three solo exhibitions at Peridot. But she was frustrated by the gallery's refusal to show her drawings, which would have de-emphasized her image as a sculptor. After 1960, Asawa chose to retreat from the commercial market, creating a world of her own in their new home in Noe Valley. In 1968, the artist completed the 'Andrea' fountain for Ghirardelli Square, her first public commission. 'She wanted to make a statement about nursing mothers,' said Jepson, the model for its twin bronze mermaids, one holding a baby, the other a lily pad, like a palette, surrounded by turtles and spitting frogs. The sculpture was derided as a 'lawn ornament' and 'corny' by the landscape architect on the project, Lawrence Halprin, but quickly became beloved. In a public statement in 1969, Asawa wrote, 'I thought of all the children and maybe even some adults who would stand by the seashore waiting for a turtle or a mermaid to appear.' Asawa also recruited Jepson and scores of other creative parents to work in the Alvarado School Arts Workshop that she founded in 1968, outraged by the insipid art projects her children were bringing home. Jepson remembered seeing Buckminster Fuller one day working with 8-year-olds, building a dome from half pint milk cartons. By 1973, the workshop had spread to seven schools and received city funding. For her 'San Francisco Fountain,' Asawa had more than 250 schoolchildren and adults contribute little figures and city landmarks molded in her signature playdough on its 41 panels, then cast in bronze. When SFMOMA gave her a midcareer survey in 1973, 'it was her preference to have a dough-in where thousands of people could make baker's clay figurines in lieu of a snooty opening,' the museum's Bishop said. A member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the artist was a driving force behind the establishment of the San Francisco School of the Arts, a public high school, in 1982. 'She wanted real artists in the classrooms,' said Susan Stauter, artistic director emeritus for the San Francisco Unified School District. 'She brought the Black Mountain College ethic with her. It was almost a religious commitment.' After Asawa developed lupus in 1985, she focused on drawings from her garden, which the retrospective also spotlights. Her hands became too unsteady after 2000 to continue drawing. She lived to see the school renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. Asawa maintained that artists weren't special; they were just ordinary people who could 'take ordinary things and make them special,' she said. 'I always had my studio in my house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me — or a peanut butter sandwich.'
