The Transformative Art of Ruth Asawa

     When I bought this page of commemorative stamps in 2020, I didn't know anything about the featured artist. I just now finished Marilyn Chase's biography, "Everything She Touched: Life of Ruth Asawa," and am blown away by the story of the artist who created these fascinating sculptures.

     Ruth Asawa was born in 1926, the middle of seven children in a farming family in rural Los Angeles County. As citizens of Japanese ancestry, the young artist Ruth and her family were taken from their home and sent to internment camps for the duration of WWII. Even while being held for weeks in the old horse stalls at the Santa Anita Racetrack awaiting their final train ride to the camps, Ruth managed to take drawing lessons from several Disney artists who were also interned there!
     After spending her high school years in an Arkansas camp, Ruth's Quaker church sponsored her training in Wisconsin to be an art teacher. Sadly, even though she completed the coursework, she was unable to find employment in that state due to ongoing prejudice against Japanese Americans. Disappointed but never discouraged, Ruth accepted a friend's invitation to join her for summer art classes at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It turned out to be another fortuitous turn that would change her life. Now legendary, Black Mountain College was a hotbed for artists and thinkers like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jacob Lawrence, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Merce Cunningham.  Ruth stayed at Black Mountain for 3 years, studying under the great Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers, who had themselves fled the persecution of artists and intellectuals of Hitler's Germany. 

     While she was at Black Mountain, Ruth took several trips to Mexico where she met artists such as Diego Rivera as well as the artisans who weave intricate metal wire baskets. It was here that Ruth learned the technique that would be the medium for her abstract sculptures. Weaving metal wire is not an easy task and her fingertips were often covered with Bandaids! Many people have drawn the parallel between the barbed wire fences of the internment camps transforming into the beautiful wire mesh of her sculptures and while I don't believe that it was a conscious decision on her part, it's an impressive impression.
     Needless to say, after reading the book, I was excited to see the above 2 pieces that are currently on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

     Even though she did not become an art teacher herself, in the end Ruth left an impressive legacy in arts education with the establishment of The Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, a public magnet high school in San Francisco. She also left several public art creations in San Francisco, the last of which was the landscape design for a Garden of Remembrance featuring 10 large boulders, one for each of the Japanese internment camps.