“The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air” Displays Prolific Career of Wire Sculpture Artist at Japanese American National Museum March 10-May 27

The unique career of Ruth Asawa, an artist whose looped-wire sculptures defied traditional conventions, is highlighted in the traveling exhibition, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, which opens at the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday, March 10, 2007 and runs through Sunday, May 27, 2007. Curated by Dr. Daniell Cornell of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this exhibition of sculptures and works on paper recognizes one of the most important but overlooked women artists of the 20th Century, who has devoted over five decades to creating sculptures out of nontraditional materials that are meant to be seen floating in the air and not as free-standing objects.

This exhibition represents a retrospective of this nisei (second generation Japanese American) artist's enduring and richly varied career. Born on a truck farm in Southern California, Asawa along with her family was unconstitutionally incarcerated at the government-run Rohwer concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II. In the 1940s, she attended Black Mountain College, the famous experimental art school in North Carolina. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa begins with her earliest sculptures, drawings, and paintings created at Black Mountain College, and highlights the signature wire sculptures that formed her visual vocabulary of looped and tied open forms, which she continued to experiment with throughout her career.

Born in Norwalk, California to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa became a groundbreaking modernist sculptor of abstract forms, whose work was widely lauded in the 1950s and 1960s. However, she is often not included with other 20th Century sculptors. "Because her work uses nontraditional materials and a manual method that appears related to knitting, weaving and craft, it is often overlooked in discussions of modernist sculpture," explained Dr. Cornell, who is Director of Contemporary Art Projects and Curator of American Art. "Furthermore, her decision to create works that hang, often meant to be seen from below, challenges the standard conventions of sculpture."

Also, because Asawa refused to compromise her role as a wife and mother of six children, she was described in the 1950s as a "San Francisco housewife" and her work was depicted as " 'domestic' sculptures in a feminine, handiwork mode." Her Japanese heritage also was a factor in categorizing the nature of her work, ignoring her Black Mountain College experience and her relationship to instructors such as Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. These limiting labels explain Asawa's desire to be seen as an artist and not as defined as solely Japanese American or Asian American.

"The Japanese American National Museum is honored to have the work of artist Ruth Asawa installed at our site in Los Angeles," said Irene Y. Hirano, President and CEO of the National Museum. "Her story of growing up on a farm in Norwalk with Issei parents and being unlawfully incarcerated during World War II is a familiar one to our institution. Her contributions as an artist are something more people should come to know."

This exhibition has been organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and is supported, in part, by the LEF Foundation. The Los Angeles presentation of The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air is made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation, the Aratani Foundation, and The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support was provided by Ernest & Kiyo Doizaki and Hazel & Kokki Shindo. Media sponsors are the Los Angeles Downtown News, KSCI-TV and the Rafu Shimpo.

Exhibition

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air traces her artistic development from her student drawings and paintings created while enrolled at Black Mountain College to her development of her pioneering modernist wire sculpture as well as her public commissions and activism in education and the arts. The exhibition places Asawa's work within the larger national context of artists who viewed art as a way of thinking and acting instead of stylized technique.

The exhibition, curated by Dr. Daniell Cornell of the Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, highlights Ruth Asawa's work, presenting her hanging sculpture and works on paper as well as documentary source materials, featuring notebooks and vintage photographs by Imogen Cunningham.

Dr. Cornell observes that "Asawa's artwork has always been concerned as much with space as with the objects that she creates to occupy it." He credits her training under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College with teaching her to focus on "negative space in both two and three dimensions", a concept Asawa originally encountered when she took calligraphy classes at Japanese school in Norwalk.

Because of the inherent nature of metal wire and Asawa's looping process, her sculptures take on a dynamic existence. Japanese American National Museum curator Karin Higa notes that Asawa's wire sculptures are always in flux, with "no front or back or inside or outside. Inherent in an Asawa wire sculpture, then, are its various states. Not only does the exterior become the interior and back again, but the material contains simultaneously its past and future states."

Asawa's own view of her work is not confined by traditional definitions. "Whether it's craft or whether it's art," she explained in an interview. "That is a definition that people put on things. It's just that that (wire) happens to be material I use. And I think that is important. That you take an ordinary material like wire and you make it, you give it a new definition."

The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to experience Asawa's work in a collective presentation. While acknowledging the strength of each individual piece, Dr. Cornell found that to "experience the works as a group installation (is) even more compelling. Asawa's sculptures inhabit the room with an alert, yet mysterious, stillness that can be associated with meditation. Viewers who have been chatting before entering the installation frequently stop in stunned silence, suddenly more aware in the midst of these objects that share an ineffable affinity."

Ruth Asawa

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born in 1926 to Haru and Umakichi Asawa, the fourth of seven children. Her parents ran a truck farm in Norwalk, California, and all the children had chores. Ruth's main responsibility was to heat the water for the family bathhouse her father had constructed, gathering wood and keeping the fire going underneath the floor of the bath. Ruth's first exposure to art came at Japanese school on Saturdays where she first learned calligraphy. But the Norwalk public schools also provided art classes and Ruth was encouraged to draw.

When World War II began, the U.S. government began a massive unconstitutional forced removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and parts of Hawai'i. Umakichi, a community leader, was arrested by the FBI and isolated from his family. Like many Issei (the immigrant generation), Umakichi was never charged with a crime, but was held by the Justice Department in detention camps. The Asawa family was forced to abandon their farm and most of their possessions and wound up in the Santa Anita racetrack in April of 1942, living in horse stalls. While conditions were harsh, privacy non-existent and the future uncertain, Ruth unexpectedly benefited from the grouping together of Japanese American artists, including Benji Okubo and Hideo Date, and Disney Studio animators such as Tom Okamoto, Chris Ishii and Ben Tanaka. Ruth was able to study drawing with Okamoto.

The government ultimately sought to remove all Japanese Americans from the West Coast and they constructed 10 major concentration camps in mostly desolate areas in seven states west of the Mississippi River. The Asawas were sent to Rohwer, Arkansas, a wooded swampland located in the southeastern part of the state. Unlike Santa Anita, Rohwer had organized schools for the students and Ruth was ably taught by art teacher Mabel Rose Jamison, who overcame the lack of art supplies to encourage Ruth's artistic talents. Upon graduation, Ruth, through the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council (NJASRC), an initiative of the American Friends Service Committee, enrolled in the Milwaukee State Teachers College, where NJASRC paid for her tuition.

Asawa made several lifelong friends during her three years in Milwaukee, but she was told that no school in Wisconsin would hire a person of Japanese ancestry, which made getting her degree in teaching impossible. After a trip to Mexico City with her sister Lois, Asawa, upon the urging of friends, enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the summer of 1946. An alternative educational institution, Black Mountain required the students to work 10 to 12 hours a week to maintain the college. Asawa's artistic career was shaped by her instructor, Josef Albers, along with other instructors such as Buckminster Fuller. It was Albers' teaching that led Asawa to explore the possibilities of her looped-wire sculpture.

Asawa met fellow student Albert Lanier at Black Mountain College. The two would eventually marry, move to San Francisco and raise six children. Lanier worked as an architect, while Asawa cared for the children and experimented with her wire sculpture. "My materials were simple and whenever there was a free moment, I would sit down and do some work," Asawa explained. "Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done."

Asawa's work began to appear in local exhibitions in the 1950s and was reviewed favorably in such publications as Time and Arts & Architecture. Major collectors began acquiring her wire sculptures and donating them to institutions such as the Whitney Museum. By the 1960s, Asawa began receiving commissions for public sculptures throughout San Francisco, including the Joseph Magnin department store, Fox Plaza and the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory. Asawa also continued to draw and, through Albers, received a Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship in Los Angeles, resulting in 52 lithographs.

Concerned that there were no art classes at the local elementary school, Asawa and her friend Sally Woodbridge founded the Alvarado Art Workshop in 1968. It was the first of a series of public service commitments, including serving on the San Francisco Art Commission, President Carter's Commission on Mental Health and the commission's Role of the Arts committee, and the California Arts Council. In 1974, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency commissioned Asawa to create a piece for Buchanan Plaza in Japantown and she chose origami as the style for the sculpture. She also created a realistic bas-relief depicting the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II for San Jose and more recently designed a Garden of Remembrance related to the mass incarceration for San Francisco State University. Her work for the Comprehensive Employment and Training (CETA) program, which employed artists in public service work, left a lasting legacy of community involvement.

Catalogue

A fully illustrated catalogue has been published by the University of California Press, with essays by Daniell Cornell, Emily K. Doman Jennings, Mary Emma Harris, Karin Higa, Jacqueline Hoefer, Paul J. Karlstrom, John Kreidler, Susan Stauter, and Sally B. Woodbridge. Organized into three sections of essays, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa is punctuated by two sections of color plates illustrating the works in the exhibition; the first plate section features her drawings, paintings, and prints and the second her sculptures. The catalogue's essays include Hoefer's studiously researched biographical portrait, Higa's examination of early influences, Harris's discussion of the pedagogical program Asawa undertook at Black Mountain College, and Asawa's own voice, from an interview conducted by American art historian Paul J. Karlstrom in 2002 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Public Programs

See Exhibition-related public programs document.

JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM

The Japanese American National Museum is dedicated to fostering greater understanding and appreciation for America's ethnic and cultural diversity by preserving and telling the stories of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Since its incorporation in 1985, the National Museum has grown into an internationally recognized institution, presenting award-winning exhibitions, groundbreaking traveling exhibits, educational public programs, innovative video documentaries and cutting-edge curriculum guides. The National Museum raised close to $60 million to renovate an historic building in 1992 and open a state-of-the-art Pavilion in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo Historic District in 1999. There are now over 50,000 members and donors representing all 50 states and 16 different countries.

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