Ruth Asawa, best known for her airy, intricate, woven-wire sculptures, is having a moment.
The United States Post Office has released a series of commemorative stamps. Her works have sold for record prices at auction. There have been retrospective exhibitions, gallery representation, international acclaim, and even a Google doodle in her honor. Since her death in 2013 at age 87, Asawa’s work, and her life story, have begun receiving their proper due.
Asawa was born in California in 1926 to Japanese immigrants. Her father came to the United States to avoid conscription in the Japanese army. Her mother was a Japanese mail-order bride, marrying a stranger in search of a better life in the promised land.
The Asawas were “truck farmers.” The entire family worked a leased plot of land, growing vegetables for roadside stands and local restaurants. This way of life was particularly difficult as the family struggled through the Great Depression. Unable to become American citizens or own land in California, they also endured increasing anti-Japanese sentiment as the nation headed towards WWII.
In 1942, Asawa’s father was arrested by the FBI and sent to a Justice Department Camp in New Mexico. It would be six years before she would see him again. Shortly thereafter, Ruth, her mother and five of her siblings were interned at Santa Anita Racetrack where they lived in the horse stables.
Prior to their incarceration, Asawa showed an aptitude for art. Her third-grade teacher encouraged her to enter a competition that asked for submissions representing “what it was like to be an American.” She came in first. At Santa Anita, she continued her art education with lessons from Disney artists who worked on Snow White and Pinocchio, interned alongside other Japanese people rounded up by the government.
The family was shipped to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas for the remainder of the war. After graduating from the camp high school in 1946, Ruth was allowed early release to attend college on the condition it was in the middle of the country. The government would not allow Japanese people to relocate back to California. Hoping to become an art teacher, she attended a teachers college in Wisconsin on a scholarship from the Quakers. There she was told that because of her race she could not complete her degree. On the advice of friends, she transferred to Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Run by painter Josef Albers, a Bauhaus alumni and German refugee, Black Mountain College enabled Asawa to study a wide range of disciplines with the likes of dancer Merce Cunningham, architect Buckminster Fuller, artist Willem de Kooning and composer John Cage. In addition to a summer spent learning weaving in Mexico, Buckingham in particular influenced Ruth’s sculpture work. Black Mountain is also where she met her husband, architect Albert Lanier.
The couple, living in an America where their marriage was illegal in many states, relocated to the more open-minded San Francisco and had six children over the next nine years. Asawa worked in her home studio when possible and began to garner attention for her sculptures. Not all of it was positive, however. Some saw her pieces as merely crafts, and in one review she was dismissed as a housewife. Still, she began to show in exhibitions and galleries and to earn financial success from her art.
Asawa also becomes socially and politically active, most notably advocating for art education. She cofounded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop (now the San Francisco Arts Education Project), aimed at making art education available to all children regardless of their neighborhood or income. In 1968, she was instrumental in opening the first public arts high school in San Francisco, which in 2010 was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor.
In addition to her solo works, Asawa completed many public installations including Andrea, a mermaid fountain at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, and the Japanese Internment Memorial in San Jose, California. Her final public project was the Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University. Included in the design are boulders from each of the 10 camps where Japanese-Americans were interned.