Latest news with #RuthAsawa
San Francisco Chronicle
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Recology art show brings the dump into the gallery
Part of living in San Francisco is having a special awareness of our trash. In our environmentally-minded region, it has long been gospel to recycle, compost and be conscious of how our consumption habits create waste. Trash also intersects with our culture, so to speak. The Bay Area has a rich history of assemblage art (when artists use found or scavenged objects to create new works), and we are the home of legendary reuse nonprofit Scrap, co-founded by artist Ruth Asawa and arts administrator Anne Marie Thielen. 'I feel so fortunate to be out there at the dump,' said Deborah Munk, manager of Recology's Artist in Residence program and its Environmental Learning Center. For the past 35 years, the program has hosted more than 190 professional artists and 60 student artists in disciplines including painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation and performance. Recology is celebrating that milestone with an exhibition, 'Art/Education/Community: 35 Years of Recology AIR' at the Minnesota Street Project. On view through Aug. 26 in the building's atrium, Gallery 107 and media room, the exhibition includes a sampling of both past artists-in-residence and student artists. Part of Recology's Sustainability Education program, the artist residency was founded by artist and activist Jo Hanson in 1990. The four-month period gives artists studio space at the company's Crocker Industrial Zone transfer center as well as a stipend and (most excitingly) access to materials recovered from the Public Reuse and Recycling Area. Artists are encouraged to be innovative and to make use of what's available onsite as they create new work for an exhibition and public program at the end of their terms. The artists and their work are part of the educational tours and workshops that happen on-site, and the Captain Planeteer in me can't help but get excited about any program that combines sustainability with creativity. Anyone expecting to see a very literal show of reused garbage is mistaken. While transformation and repurposing of materials is certainly a significant theme in the exhibition, there's a subtlety to much of the work. Kathy Aoki's 2020 'Disgraced Patriarchal Monuments: Mansplaining' — constructed from foam, signage board and a reused mannequin head depicting a bust of man in a suit — is as funny as her ongoing 'Koons Ruins' series. It's crafted so precisely you might not have guessed the materials were recycled. Michelle 'Meng' Nuguyen's 2024 sculptures depicting a Vietnamese gas pump, travel agency advertisement and a street sign are made from found wood, house paint and discarded yard items. Each piece is impeccably constructed and pristinely painted, like pop art objects. Munk said that the materials people dump and donate remain relatively consistent (paint, wood and paper are all in ready supply) but that often, artists find things that inspire their work. Construction strand board and plywood that were dumped became the basis of former staff member Victor Yañez-Lazcano's 2019 wall-mounted sculpture 'Trill,' which shows the different colored layers of the edge of materials like a mille-feuille pastry. And sometimes, as if by magic, materials will present themselves just when an artist needs them, like the costume jewelry Laura Roth Hope found to wrap around the skeleton she carved out of found plywood in her 2025 work 'Body of Land, Body of Water III.' Jamil Hellu's 2014 photo 'Splattered' shows his body covered in discarded paint as part of a community performance. The image exudes beauty and violence. Likewise, there's something both optimistic and melancholy about Kija Lucas' 2021 photo 'Untitled (5 Brooms and a Rake)' showing the objects in a darkly lit still life while a gold cloth glimmers behind them like a religious icon. Upon entering and exiting, you pass Torreya Cummings' 2023 installation 'Et in Arcadia Ego' in which an island made from fencing, plastic flora and fauna, inflatable palm trees and a shell chandelier hang upside down over a mirrored platform. When you see the plastic skeleton reflected back in the mirrors, it reads as a vital critique of mankind's continued destruction of paradise. 'I think the theme that runs through all the work here is about building community, honoring people, honoring our legacy, honoring objects,' said Munk. 'Our artists are not necessarily environmentalists, but when they leave, it changes them and their work practice.' The story of our city and the era we live in can be found in what people throw away. A show like this also speaks to ways we can rethink the problem of waste. 'We've all heard 'Recycle, reuse,'' said Munk. 'This is just a different way to reach people.'
Wall Street Journal
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Ruth Asawa: Retrospective' Review: SFMOMA's Ethereal Abstractions
San Francisco Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) has long been admired for her abstract looped-and-tied-wire sculptures—three-dimensional single- and multi-lobed transparent-mesh structures that playfully flit among art, nature, industry and craft. Suspended from the ceiling and glistening like chainmail or spiderwebs, her ghostly, often-nested, hourglass spheres conjure pods, cones, onion-domes, vegetation and sea creatures, as well as digestive tracts and birth canals.
The Guardian
04-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
Haunting interiors, kimonos galore and Lancashire Life magazine: what I've learned from snooping inside artist's homes
Last month I visited the New Jersey home of the 98-year-old artist Lois Dodd. Painting since the 1940s, Dodd is known for capturing the view outside her window – at night, during the day, in New York, from the countryside. She paints what is near to her, and loves to depict the 'theatre of nature', as she describes it. 'Because it is always changing, so you always see something different.' While any of us can look out of our windows, and capture what we see, Dodd's works are distinct. On the day I drove down to her white-planked home/studio on the springiest of days, surrounded by saturated greens and yellows, I felt as if I was in a Dodd painting like Red Laundry and Window Frame or Front Door Cushing. I've spent the best part of the last decade tracking down the homes of artists. Witnessing where someone lived, or the nature they grew up around, is like seeing their work from within. Suddenly everything falls into place when you see the view they looked out on, or trace the steps they took. The poet Eileen Myles once told me that they went so far as convincing an estate agent to show them an apartment in the Chicago building Joan Mitchell grew up in – just so they could get a glimpse of the painter's childhood view overlooking Lake Michigan. It feels especially important to experience such places when it comes to female artists (particularly those working before the 21st century), whose lives were often bound to the home. Ruth Asawa looped her wire sculptures on the kitchen table surrounded by her six children; Betye Saar turned to printmaking because that's the scale the domestic space allowed for. Art history often dismisses the importance of the home (compared with the studio or factory) and just how much the practical can inform the artistic. Visiting artists' homes can also reveal the most extraordinary, and intimate, traits of their lives and practices. One that had a big impact on me was the four-storey Chelsea brownstone in New York owned by the French-American artist, Louise Bourgeois. It was tall and thin, not unlike the boxed-in, headless women in her painting series, Femme Maison. And it was a place of contradictions, the interior both haunting and inviting. Standing in her basement – a long low-ceilinged room with tools and anthropomorphic sculptures still intact – was like being in one of her cage-like Cell works. It left me with the conclusion that, for Bourgeois, her house – both a prison and site of freedom – was her muse. Another place that felt significant was British-born artist Leonora Carrington's former home in Mexico City. Situated on an unassuming street in Roma Norte, it is white-walled with black panelling and boasts red and white patterned tiles. Built around a giant tree in the middle courtyard, with branches that stretch out on to different floors and over the roof, it features a winding wrought iron staircase that looks as if it has been taken directly out of her paintings. Inside, the walls are lined with books that range from ghost stories to Celtic histories to guides on dealing with loneliness (I also spotted Lancashire Life magazine). Being here, you begin to understand not only what a voracious reader Carrington was, but how much – despite remaining in Mexico all her life – she maintained her British and Irish identity (she was even known to keep her PG tips under lock and key). One day I hope to visit the New Mexican homes of painter Georgia O'Keeffe: the Abiquiú Home and Studio, and Ghost Ranch (her summer home, 12 miles away). O'Keeffe's ways of living informed her art. Not only in her subject and colour palette – red cliffs, lunar skies, the dry dusty deserts seen in Black Mesa Landscape – but in how she dressed (variations of black suits and white shirts, wrap dresses and kimonos) and meticulously arranged her belongings corresponds directly to how she painted: the refined, seamless brush; the repeated variations on a theme. When delving into an artist's work, never underestimate the power of seeking out their home and surroundings. While it might be a 'domestic' space, it can also be a portrait of someone's interior mind, revealing more than even an artwork.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Beauty of Imperfect Children's Book Art
I can't draw hands. Or horses. If horses had hands instead of hooves and I had to draw that, I'd be in serious trouble. I'm more comfortable drawing fields or cats. But I had to draw a child's hands — big and up close — for the cover of a book. My first attempts looked like fleshy mittens. When I get stuck, I turn to other children's book artists for inspiration. Barbara McClintock is my go-to artist. I leafed through her books. Her drawings of hands in 'Adèle & Simon' were beautiful but too small. Next I turned to Kevin Henkes and his Caldecott Medal-winning 'Kitten's First Full Moon,' but his drawings of cat paws were no help at all. As I kept messing up — my wastebasket filling with crumpled paper — I felt like I was 6 years old again, trying to draw cows. I grew up on a farm. Cows roamed the fields outside our kitchen window. When I drew them, and their weird bony legs, frustration rose inside me — my cows didn't look right — then burst into a red-faced, paper-destroying tantrum. I would run away from home, up into the apple tree outside the back door. Now when I get frustrated, I head to museums. So I biked to MoMA and wandered the galleries, looking for big hands. I found Picasso's 'Two Nudes,' the women's hands captured in a few quick brushstrokes. Then I biked to the Whitney, where there was a Ruth Asawa exhibit with an ink study of hands. Her line was bold, effortless. How did she do that? Artists often have that reaction to others' art. We look for clues. This is also true for children learning to draw. On author visits to schools, I lead drawing classes. As students sketch the trees outside their classroom window, I look over their shoulders and offer encouragement. 'You call that a tree? Come on!' I don't say that. But I have the urge, especially when the students' teacher says, 'Emily, that's a perfect tree!' I don't think that's helpful when Emily is furiously scowling. I recognize that scowl. I say, 'Look close. Keep drawing.' There's always one child who sticks with it. She makes me think of Simone Biles. Biles was the same age as these grade schoolers when she started tumbling in a gym. Falling down, getting up. All that practice and grit. Now when we see her take flight into a ridiculously difficult twist, we ask how did she do that? Well, easy. That vault took decades. Biking home from the museums, I thought about training. Picasso started drawing as a young child (his father was an art teacher). He was an excellent draftsman before he became the Simone Biles of art. Asawa drew flowers and plants as a child, and studied with professional illustrators. Even when she turned to abstract sculpture, she drew every morning, as exercise. I went back to my bookshelf and leafed through more children's books. The artists I admire all share a certain looseness. Quentin Blake's scratchy ink lines bursting with motion in the Roald Dahl books he illustrated. Christian Robinson's colorful cut-paper circles in 'Another,' bouncing across the page. Sydney Smith's brushstrokes in 'Small in the City,' radiating light. Underneath their looseness is craft. Blake drew countless drafts before finding his fluid line. Robinson's bouncing art was arranged with serious deliberation. Smith's brushstrokes look like a moment's thought but — my goodness — the years it must have taken for him to achieve that. Carefree art takes great care. There was a paradox here. All the training and discipline built up, then came out on the paper in an almost unconscious act of letting go. A splotch of ink, a wayward wash of color. Imperfect but right. Finding beauty in the flaws, and acceptance. As if the artist knew when to walk away. By now there were more books in my lap than on my bookshelf. I saw the same pattern in all the children's book art I loved — in all art really — from Picasso to Sophie Blackall. Craft, imperfection, grace. Before I went back to my desk, I looked hard at one painting in 'Hello Lighthouse' by Blackall — an ocean of waves rendered in exquisite detail and technique, before it exploded into a wild storm of watercolor clouds and her art took flight. How did she do that? Maybe even she didn't know. I still had to draw the hands for my cover. Here's what I did. I stopped thinking of hands as hands. There were other things I could draw. Landscapes. So I painted the hands as if they were fields. Vertical fields, in burnt sienna and burnt umber. An hour later I was done. The hands weren't great, but I didn't rip them up. I wanted to keep some roughness. I love the whole messy process of making children's books. Starts, stops, odd hacks. I appreciate how technology improves books, but I'm also wary. About how it smooths rough edges. Makes art a little too neat. Too perfect, maybe. What gets lost if we don't hold onto the necessary frustration of the handmade? Thinking about the answer to this question makes me sad. When I'm feeling low, I go to the water. So I biked to the Hudson River, took the ferry across it and climbed to the cliffs of Weehawken. It's beautiful up here — Manhattan a mountain of glass and steel, held by the river, with clouds racing above. Sometimes, when I look at our city, I imagine forests. How it must have been. Oaks, deer, Lenape villages. Then fields, Dutch cattle, masts of ships. Centuries of stories and lives, pain and beauty, on this island. Standing at the edge of these cliffs, I close my eyes. Daydream backward, crossing oceans and epochs, to the walls of the Lascaux caves and the famous drawing of a prehistoric horse. Rough, charcoal. Perfectly imperfect. A drawing that looks like it's straight out of a good children's book. I think we know that artist. How she looked at the world, how much she desired to capture it. Her unpolished line, communicating with us across time, connecting us with our past, then forward to our children, to all of us who open a book and hold it in our hands and say yes.
San Francisco Chronicle
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ruth Asawa inspired S.F. with her art, but can she help me understand myself?
Earlier this month, I stood in front of the redwood doors of Ruth Asawa 's house and realized I loved her — as much as I could love someone I'd never met. The doors led nowhere, standing off their hinges in a white-walled gallery at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new retrospective of the late Bay Area artist's work. But examining the circular hollows she'd carved by hand into the doors, I realized I'd been looking for her my whole life so that I could ask her a question. Like the underground creeks that run through my Oakland neighborhood, Ruth has been my constant, unseen companion. Her art backdropped my most tender memories. Drinking tea with my grandmother at our favorite garden in Golden Gate Park while Ruth was there as a bronze plaque molded to a stone. Sketching taxidermied predators at a natural history exhibit in Oakland as Ruth took the form of a wire sculpture on the wall. Waiting for my high school best friend on the Embarcadero on the weekends with Ruth standing by as an origami-esque circle of folded steel. I told all of this to Ruth's youngest daughter, Addie Lanier, in the back corner of a San Francisco cafe, that Ruth had been like a shadow attached at my ankle since childhood. 'That's appropriate that she was a shadow in your life,' said Addie, 66. 'She said, 'The shadow reveals the form' of her work because the shadow shows you there's all these layers inside.' But it wasn't until last winter, when I saw a photo at the Oakland Museum, that I realized who cast that shadow. The image haunted me for months: A butt-naked baby sat in the foreground, two woven sculptures hanging above him like gourds, while three other children busied themselves with their own tasks. In the background, face and body partly obscured by the sculptures, was a woman. She leaned forward, elbows propped on her knees and a spool of wire by her sneakers. 'Ruth Asawa and Children,' read the description. It was the most beautiful photograph I'd ever seen. And it also made me feel a bit nauseous, which happens when I've forgotten something important like my passport or to call my dad on his birthday. Only the something I'd forgotten was Ruth — her name embedded deep in my conscience alongside memories of wandering around the library after school and listening to the local radio station from my car seat with acorns in my pockets. On the internet, I finally saw Ruth's face. In black and white, her dark hair and broad cheekbones reminded me of the photos of my great-grandparents after they, and other Japanese and Japanese American citizens, were shipped out of California and incarcerated in Arkansas during World War II. Her face reformed in my mind as I boarded a plane to our shared ancestral homeland of Japan. While reading her biography, 'Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa,' during the 12-hour flight, I learned that we both shared a love for matzo ball soup, the children's book 'Make Way for Ducklings' and Zen Buddhism. We each cut our college classmates' hair and studied watercolor. Ruth was also incarcerated at a WWII prison camp in Arkansas and later moved to San Francisco in 1949. I sat in my favorite cafe in Kyoto with an egg yolk over a bowl of rice while the Ruth in the book made rhubarb cake for her Bay Area community, carved her own doors from redwood trunks, organized funding for public arts programming and voiced her solidarity with Muslims after 9/11. Critics exotified her as 'oriental' and domesticated her as a 'housewife and mother.' The public speculated on the deeper meaning of her work. But Ruth seemed to pay no attention to any of it, never offering an explanation. She kept weaving, and mothering. 'Ruth was no fan of any labels — female, Asian, modern — preferring to stand on her own, as an individual 'minority of one,' her biographer wrote. She was fiercely unbothered, titling most of her sculptural works 'Untitled.' I, meanwhile, on the verge of turning 26 while reading about her, was having an identity crisis. What kind of writer am I? An Asian American writer? A writer who sometimes writes about Asian America? Should I also be an artist? Should I be a parent? Should I move to Japan? I quietly panicked on the train to Osaka, where Ruth has a sculpture mounted to a wall at the National Museum of Art. The bundle of wires that fanned out at its edges like a cross-section of a dandelion was immediately familiar. There's one just like it at the entrance of the Oakland Museum that, as a kid, I'd imagined as the symbol of my home city for all its tree-like bifurcations. But this time I saw its shadow, too, which blurred its frayed edges beyond definition. Back at SFMOMA, I sat in a recreation of Ruth's Noe Valley living room that faced a photo of her real living room like a mirror. Woven sculptures hung from the museum ceiling in the same orientation she'd once arranged them in. A week later I told Addie about my identity crisis, that I didn't know who I should be. 'My mom didn't really talk about identity,' she said. 'To her, identity was what you do, how you live.' I imagined Ruth sitting there on the floor, surrounded by spools of wire but also her friends and family. I saw myself, too, writing on my green rug, surrounded by the people I love. When Ruth was granted permission to leave the Arkansas prison camp and attend college, Ruth's mother bowed to her, Addie said, and told Ruth who she should be. 'Be lucky,' she said. I didn't fully understand what she meant and neither did Addie, who shrugged. But I felt myself taking this to heart, like a cell accepting a much needed nutrient. I asked, and Ruth answered.
