I’ll be honest, it’s what I do. I never heard of her until the legendary United States Postal Service announced twenty new stamps featuring ten works of art by Ruth Asawa. Practically felt ashamed of myself. So I investigated. – JDW

Ruth Asawa postage stamps are coming soon: The Amazing U.S. Postal Service

It brings me, and my future sheltered-in-place art projects, a lot of joy that Ruth Asawa postage stamps have been announced.

The ever so valuable USPS hasn’t revealed the release date just yet.

Showcasing Asawa’s wire sculptures, the pane includes 20 stamps, with two each of 10 designs, featuring photographs by Dan Bradica and Laurence Cuneo. The selvage features a photograph of Asawa taken by Nat Farbman in 1954 for Life magazine. Ethel Kessler served as art director and designer.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”

Internment

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In the hysteria following the outbreak of the World War II, the United States government feared that Japanese Americans would commit acts of sabotage against their country. Although no such act was ever committed by a Japanese American, some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the Western United States were removed from their homes and made to live in internment camps. Of these, almost 80,000 were United States citizens; 40,000 were children. Ruth Asawa was one of these citizen children.

In February 1942, Ruth’s father Umakichi, a 60 year-old farmer who had been living in the United States for forty years, was arrested by FBI agents and taken to a camp in New Mexico. The family did not see him for almost two years. In April, Ruth was sent along with her mother and five siblings to the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, California, where they lived for five months in two horse stalls. They took only what they could carry. “The stench was horrible,” she recalled. “The smell of horse dung never left the place the entire time we were there.”

Suddenly Ruth did not have to work long hours on the family farm, and she used her free time to draw. Among the internees were animators from the Walt Disney Studios, who taught art in the grandstands of the race track. In September, the Asawa family was sent by train to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, where Ruth continued to spend most of her free time painting and drawing.

The Rohwer Relocation Center, surrounded by eight watch towers and barbed wire fences, held eight thousand Japanese Americans. It was built next to a swamp of cypress trees.

“There were lines for everything,” Ruth recalled. “I believe half of our time there was spent waiting in line.” The water was hard to get used to. “It smelled like rotten eggs. The only way it was halfway palatable was to boil it and make tea.” The Asawa family lived in a tar-paper barracks in Block 13.

Ruth was fortunate because her period of incarceration lasted only eighteen months. A Quaker organization called the Japanese American Student Relocation Council gave her a scholarship to attend college in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In August 1943, she was issued an identification card by the War Relocation Authority that permitted her to travel to Milwaukee. Her high school English teacher from Rohwer, Mrs. William Beasley, drove her to the train station. She told Ruth, “This is a terrible thing my government has done to your people. Don’t look back on your life here. You must go on.” Ruth never returned to visit her family in Rohwer who were released from the camp in November 1945. She did not see her parents again until 1948.

For many Japanese Americans, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreparable harm. For Ruth, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life. In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she reflected on the experience:

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.”

Asawa At Work

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“An artist is not special.  An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

Asawa took the best from other people and overlooked their flaws. She worked long hours, attended meetings and performances in the evenings, and often drew late into the night. She was curious about how things were made and enjoyed hearing from others how to make them.

“We always saw her making art, it was part of her everyday existence. I never thought of her making art as a separate activity. To us, she wasn’t working. We didn’t have to be quiet so she could concentrate. Her artmaking space was always in our house…” — Aiko Cuneo, a daughter watching her mother work

Her collaboration with other artists was one of her chief pleasures. She was a scrounger. She gathered cast-off materials to use as art supplies so that she would have them on hand and could share with others. She kept her studio in her home and made it a community center for her friends and neighbors. She was an outspoken advocate for the arts.

Asawa learned from her internment at age 16 that the ideals of social acceptance and job security were a fantasy. That the only security available to her, and probably everyone else, was to “do what one wanted to do by choice.”

Black Mountain Work

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“I studied drawing and painting and we were encouraged to use whatever we could find. Since we didn’t have anything to work with, we worked with the leaves which were plentiful in North Carolina, the wild leaves. The dogwood leaves turned a brilliant red when the frost came.”

Asawa’s three years at Black Mountain College (1946-1949)  shaped her profoundly and gave her the courage to grow into an artist, wife, mother, activist and citizen of the universe. The college included all of the arts, architecture, literature, dance, mathematics, and music. Her most important mentor was the former Bauhaus teacher and artist, Josef Albers, who taught basic design. Albers recruited talented artists, often those with contrasting sensibilities, to come and spend a summer, semester or a year to broaden the students’ exposure to ways of seeing and working. It was a work-study community where faculty and students performed together, ate together, farmed and shared kitchen duties. There were no beginning or advanced courses. She was not awarded a degree. As Albers was fond of saying, “Art knows nothing about graduation.”

“Albers always discouraged us to make a line with black and then fill it in because it kills the interaction of color. He discouraged us from using black as a color. The interaction of two colors, say orange and green, butting up right next to each other, was more exciting.”

Looped Wire Sculpture

“My curiosity was aroused by the idea of giving structural form to the images in my drawings. These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”

In 1954, Asawa was asked to explain her work for her first show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. What set her work apart from others making sculpture then was their lightness and transparency, as well as their movement since they were suspended from the ceiling. She wrote, “A woven mesh not unlike medieval mail. A continuous piece of wire, forms envelop inner forms, yet all forms are visible (transparent). The shadow will reveal an exact image of the object.” It was only much later in life that she realized that she had made the same forms as a young child on her parents’ farm. Sitting on the back of a horse-drawn leveler, which scraped the soil so that irrigation water could reach the end of the rows, she dragged her toes in the fine soil as the horses walked to make the playful and complex biomorphic outlines of her looped wire sculptures.

Tied Wire Sculpture

“I started in 1962 when a friend of ours brought a desert plant from Death Valley and said, ‘Here’s something for you to draw.’ I tried to draw it, but it was such a tangle that I had to construct it in wire in order to draw it. And then I got the idea that I could use it as a way to work in wire. I began to see all the possibilities: opening up the center and then making it flat on the wall, and putting it on a stand.”

Asawa often describes these tied-wired sculptures using terms such as “tree” and “branching form.” She began with a center stem of 200 to 1,000 wires, which she then divided into branches using nature as her model. As she continued working in this form, she moved into more abstract forms using geometric centers of four, five, six, and seven points. If you look at these sculptures, you can see how the number of points in the center defines the forms that the branches take.  As with her other work, these tied wire forms gave her the freedom to explore how “the relation between outside and inside was interdependent, integral.”

Electroplated

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Asawa sought advice on how best to clean her looped-wire sculptures from industrial plating companies in San Francisco. The brass, iron, and copper were beginning to tarnish and oxidize. A couple of businesses dismissed her request to clean sculptures as not worth their effort. But she finally found C&M Plating Works, where Carl and Mac “took pity on me and were willing to try new things.” They helped her experiment with cleaning methods and patinas. On a trip to the platers in the early 1960s, Asawa noticed some crusty copper bars in the plating tank, the byproduct of a process that smoothed the chrome for car bumpers. She admired their gritty texture and green patina. She asked Mac to help her figure out how to get the same texture and color on her tied wire sculptures. Through trial and error, they reversed the electroplating process. After she formed the sculpture in copper wire, it remained in a chemical tank for months, where it grew layers of rough, green and colorful textured skin similar to coral or bark.

Cast Sculpture

“…I am fascinated by the possibilities of transforming cold metal into shapes that emulate living organic forms.”

Asawa began experimenting with cast forms in the mid 1960s. For her first public commission, the Andrea mermaid fountain at Ghirardelli Square, she had to design the mermaid’s tail. Her solution was to first loop it in wire, then dip it in wax, and then cast it in bronze. She enjoyed working with the foundrymen at the San Francisco Art Foundry, and she was captivated by how she could take an idea from one material, add to it with wax, have it invested or made into a mold, and then see it transformed into bronze. She did this with wire, paper, baker’s clay, even persimmon stems. Her cast sculptures reaffirmed what she learned from her teacher Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, “The artist must discover the uniqueness and integrity of the material.”

Asawa is celebrated as a sculptor, but her art training was primarily in basic design and drawing. She drew everyday — in the morning before her family was awake, when watching her children, when watching television, at the many public meetings she attended as an activist. Meandering lines and patterns, explorative variations of the same form or subject, and the most economical way to convey an image characterize her work. The act of drawing, not the drawing itself, mattered to her. Drawing was a daily exercise to hone her perception and concentration so that she was always ready to see.

Paintings

Before she became a sculptor, Asawa wanted to be a painter. She grew up on a farm and had a lifelong love of observing plants which she often painted. Black Mountain College taught her to see the fluid relationships between color, form, and space. Her student paintings from Black Mountain are exploratory and abstract. Later on she returned to figurative painting — to the plants and flowers whose natural forms fascinated and inspired her.

Prints

“The excitement of printing has not left me, but I know it would take another lifetime to do it well.”

In 1965, Josef Albers recommended Asawa for a fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The mission of the workshop was to revive the art of traditional lithography and collaborative printing by bringing artists and printers together. Leaving her six children and husband in San Francisco for two months, Asawa worked with seven accomplished printers to create 54 lithographs from her original works. She had an apartment near the workshop and cooked dinner for the printers so they could go back after eating and work through the evening.

Public Commissions

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“When I work on big projects, such as a fountain, I like to include people who haven’t yet developed their creative side — people yearning to let their creativity out. I like designing projects that make people feel safe, not afraid to get involved.”

Beginning in the late 1960s, Asawa received many commissions to make public sculptures and fountains. These works can be found in San Francisco, San Jose, and other places in Northern California. For some of the works, Asawa drew upon her life-long interest and experimentation with paper folding, also known as origami.

As a child, Asawa studied origami at the Japanese Cultural School she attended on Saturdays. In college, her teacher Josef Albers assigned design problems in which students transformed paper from two dimensions (flat) to three dimensions (3-D) by folding it. Two of her commissions, Aurora and the Nihonmachi fountains, are paperfold designs.

Commissions such as the Hyatt Fountain on Union Square and the Japanese American Internment Memorial owe their existence to her work as an arts activist in public schools. For these works, she used baker’s clay — a simple, easy-to-make, non-toxic dough which she mixed for thousands of children over the years — and cast the finished baker’s clay designs in bronze. These large public commissions gave Asawa a chance to experiment with new materials and techniques.

A LIFE MADE BY HAND: The Story of Ruth Asawa 

Another Japanese-American artist comes to the attention of young readers in A LIFE MADE BY HAND: The Story of Ruth Asawa (Princeton Architectural Press, 40 pp., $17.95; ages 5 to 8). Andrea D’Aquino introduces us to Asawa as a little girl who spends her time looking closely at the world and making things with whatever was at hand. “What a fascinating shape your shell is, Snail,” she has Ruth say.

Asawa studied art at Black Mountain College, the heart of mid-20th-century avant-garde art, and her teachers, we learn, included Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller. D’Aquino nicely connects the imaginative life of the child with the professional artist she became. This is reinforced in the illustrations, which are a playful combination of pencil drawings and collage with a loose and spontaneous feel. I first saw Asawa’s luminous wire sculptures a few years ago, and I was struck by how beautifully D’Aquino’s renderings capture the spirit of Asawa’s work.

Ruth Asawa, an Artist Who Wove Wire, Dies at 87

By Douglas Martin for The New York Times. August 17, 2013.

Ruth Asawa, an artist who learned to draw in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II and later earned renown weaving wire into intricate, flowing, fanciful abstract sculptures, died on Aug. 6 at her home in San Francisco, where many of her works now dot the cityscape. She was 87.

Her daughter Aiko Cuneo confirmed the death.

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Gaining notice in the art world while still a student, she soon began building a wider following with abstract wire sculptures that expressed both the craftsmanship she had learned from Mexican basket makers as well as her ambition to extend line drawings into a third dimension. Many of these were hanging mobiles.

In 1968 she startled her admirers by creating her first representational work, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront. It had two mermaids — one nursing a “merbaby” — frogs, turtles, splashing water and a recording of frogs croaking.

Lawrence Halprin, the distinguished landscape architect who designed the waterfront space, had planned to install an abstract fountain. But after a long, unexplained delay, the developer chose Ms. Asawa for the job. Her creation set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art. Mr. Halprin, who had been a fan of Ms. Asawa’s abstractions, complained that the mermaids looked like a suburban lawn ornament.

Ms. Asawa countered with old-fashioned sentiment. “For the old, it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood,” she said, “and for the young, it would give them something to remember when they grow old.”

By and large, San Franciscans loved it. Ms. Asawa went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the “fountain lady.” For a work in a plaza near Union Square, she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city in dough, which were then cast in iron.

The work became the locus of a dispute this summer with Apple Inc., which wanted to remove the sculpture to make way for a plaza adjacent to a store it is building. After a public outcry, the company and the city promised to protect the sculpture, but the final disposition of the piece remains unresolved.

Ms. Asawa’s wire sculptures are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In May, one of her pieces sold at auction at Christie’s for $1.4 million, four times its appraised value.

After the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco opened a new building in 2005, it installed 15 of Ms. Asawa’s most significant hanging wire sculptures at the base of its tower. As they drift with air currents, her large organic forms have been said to resemble a giant, eerie kelp forest.

Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”

Ms. Asawa said another influence came from riding on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment on the fruit and vegetable farms where her Japanese-American parents worked in California. She made patterns with her feet as they dragged on the ground.

“We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures,” she said in an interview with The Contra Costa Times in 2006.

A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born on Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk, a Southern California farming town. Her third-grade teacher encouraged her artwork, and in 1939, her drawing of the Statue of Liberty took first prize in a school competition to represent what it means to be an American.

In 1942 F.B.I. agents seized her father and sent him to an internment camp in New Mexico. Ms. Asawa did not see him for six years. Two months later, she, her mother and her five siblings were taken to the racetrack. After five months, they were taken to a camp in Arkansas, where Ms. Asawa graduated from high school.

In 1943, a Quaker organization arranged for her to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to prepare to be an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

Ms. Asawa then spent three years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers. There she befriended the choreographer Merce Cunningham and studied painting with Albers, whose theories on color were immensely influential. While still a student of his, in 1948, she caught the attention of a reviewer for The Times, who observed that her work “transformed Albers’ color-shape experiments into personal fantasy.”

Ms. Asawa had started exploring wire as an artistic medium after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out,” she explained. “It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

Ms. Asawa wore bandages to protect her hands when working with wire, but still suffered constant cuts. When young, her children were usually at her side while she worked.

Her husband of 59 years, Albert Lanier, an architect she met at Black Mountain, died in 2008. Their son Adam died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Cuneo, she is survived by her sons, Xavier, Hudson and Paul Lanier; her daughter Addie Lanier; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Asawa supported arts education in San Francisco public schools, and in 2011, the one to which she was most devoted was renamed for her. For years Ms. Asawa maintained the grounds herself.

Her own educational experience came full circle in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had prevented her from graduating a half-century earlier when it was a teachers college, sought to present her with an honorary doctorate. Ms. Asawa asked that she be awarded the bachelor’s degree instead.