Commercial success came very late in life for Ruth Asawa. Born in 1926 in California, she faced rampant discrimination of Japanese Americans during World War II. During her high school days, she was forced to live in an internment camp. After graduating in 1943, she went to the Milwaukee State Teachers College to become an art teacher. She completed all of her graduation requirements except for a teaching internship, which she was unable to complete because no one would hire a Japanese American at that time. She left in 1946 and headed to North Carolina. For the next three years, she was a student at Black Mountain College, a center of avant-garde art, architecture, music, and dance. Joseph Albers was one of her teachers and mentors.
In 1948, she hit upon a distinctive way of weaving wire into hanging sculptures that played with transparency and shadows. She also created drawings that complemented perfectly her three-dimensional work. In 1949, she moved to San Francisco where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. Despite her talent, daily devotion to her artwork (in addition to raising six children), and some early critical success, she was an “artist’s artist” working in relative obscurity. John Yau, who studied and wrote about the artist, said:
“In every account of Ruth Asawa’s life, one thing stands out. With remarkable economy, she was able to transform the many obstacles that lay in her path—from her impoverished childhood on a small truck farm, to the racial and sexual politics she encountered at different points in her life—into lessons learned. Her creative genius endowed her with the ability to repurpose whatever she has experienced. In her original synthesis of form, process, and transparency, Asawa has created a diverse body of work that challenges the historical definition of sculpture. Whatever threatened to block her progress instead helped her to become an artist without peer.”
Interest in Asawa continues to grow. The Whitney Museum included her work in the reinstallation of the permanent collection when the museum moved to its new building. The de Young Museum in San Francisco has a large group of works on permanent display. Christie’s organized two private selling exhibitions of her work in 2013 and 2015. The artist was able to experience some of this burst of interest before passing away in 2013 when she was eighty-seven years old.
Note: This profile is an extract from Art Collecting Today: Market Insights for Everyone Passionate About Art, a book by Doug Woodham (my husband) that is being published this April by Allworth Press.
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