Ruth Asawa's Astonishing Universe Began at Her Door

New York Times

04-04-2025

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.'