The character arc of Ruth Asawa

Who was Ruth Asawa?

They would not let her teach. She called it a godsend.

She was the fourth of seven children on a truck farm in Norwalk that grew walnuts and ran dairies. Her third grade teacher encouraged her to make her own work. In 1942 the family was interned: her father separately, and the rest of them at an assembly centre at the Santa Anita racetrack for much of that year, then at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. Held in the same camp was a group of artists from the Walt Disney studios, who ran classes for the children, and that is where she learned to draw.

Her own account of the internment is the one this page uses, because it is hers. She said she held no hostility for what happened and blamed no one, that sometimes good comes through adversity, that she would not be who she was today had it not been for the internment, and that she liked who she was.

In 1943 a scholarship got her out of the camp to Milwaukee State Teachers College. She wanted to be an art teacher. Wisconsin would not give her a teaching post because of her Japanese ancestry, and she was told it might be difficult for her with the memories of the war still fresh, that her life might even be in danger. She called that a godsend, because it encouraged her to follow her interest in art, and she enrolled at Black Mountain College instead.

Black Mountain, from 1946 to 1949, is where it all arrived. Josef Albers taught her to use commonplace materials and she began experimenting with wire. Ilya Bolotowsky shaped her drawing. Buckminster Fuller was there, and Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, Willem de Kooning and Merce Cunningham, whose dance classes she said were especially inspirational; in one of them she ran down a hill with a flaming torch to The Rite of Spring. She retook the same Albers courses year after year and found that sitting with the same problem took her deeper into it. On a trip to Mexico in 1947 a teacher showed her a knitted-wire loop technique used for baskets, and that became the sculpture she is known for.

She held her first New York exhibition in 1955 and by the early 1960s had commercial and critical success. Then she turned it outward, under a phrase she used constantly: art for everyone. Her first public sculpture, Andrea, went into Ghirardelli Square in 1968, installed at night so it would look as though it had always been there. The landscape architect originally chosen for the space called it a suburban lawn ornament and demanded its removal; she answered that for the old it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood and for the young it would give them something to remember when they grow old, and many San Franciscans, especially women, rallied to protect it. For another fountain she had two hundred schoolchildren model images of the city in dough and cast them in iron. She became the fountain lady. In 1968 she joined the San Francisco Arts Commission and co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop, which became a national model for employing artists in public service. The San Francisco School of the Arts was renamed after her in 2010.

The moments

Ruth Asawa's timeline.

Ruth Asawa: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Ruth Asawa, English Wikipedia biography.
• Her own statements about the internment and about being refused a teaching post, as quoted there.
• The de Young Museum curatorial assessment of her work, as quoted there.
• The United States Postal Service series of ten stamps commemorating her wire sculptures, 2020.