TRANSPARENT | LINES

Ruth Asawa

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 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.”

Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Asawa at Work with Children, 1957

The subversively “domestic” artist.

By Robert Sullivan

Less than five years after graduating from Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, Ruth Asawa’s industrial-wire sculptures were getting notice in the national press, though invariably her pieces were dismissed as women’s craft work, as opposed to art. “These are ‘domestic’ sculptures in a feminine, handiwork mode,” ArtNews said in 1956. Such critiques masked her relentless subversiveness. After dark, on March 18, 1968, she installed her first public sculpture, in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco: two mermaids in a fountain, one nursing a merbaby. (Asawa cast a neighbor who had just given birth, and then surrounded the bronze statue with frogs seemingly in the midst of making more frogs.) The landscape architect in charge of the square’s renovation, Lawrence Halprin, described the sculpture as a suburban lawn ornament and sought to replace it with a modernist abstraction — a 15-foot shaft. San Franciscans, especially women, successfully rallied behind Asawa.

In The San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the episode, Asawa’s credentials were contrasted with Halprin’s; Asawa was presented as a wife, a homemaker, and a “mother of six.” But she embraced her role as “mother of six,” as did her friends and admirers. (In an oral history, she recalled that her mentor at Black Mountain, Josef Albers, dissuaded some students from having children but told Asawa what he told students drawing flowers: “Make sure they’re yours.”) One of her favorite photos was taken by Imogen Cunningham, a photographer, and a friend: Asawa’s naked 1-year-old drinks from a bottle, an older sibling draws, Asawa crochets wire and her giant sculptures envelop all. “It was always just a part of our life to just see her always working,” her daughter Aiko recalled recently. “And if we really wanted to talk to her, we got one of the dowels, and we’d start coiling wire for her so that we’d be helping her and having a conversation with her.” The distinction between domestic and non-domestic art would have made no sense to Asawa. “Art is doing,” she wrote. “Art deals directly with life.”

A related lifelong project was her 48-year campaign on behalf of arts education. She co-founded a community-based program that today brings artists and artisans to San Francisco schools. “Art can only be taught by artists,” she said. “If a nonartist teaches a subject called art, it is nonart.” And she helped establish San Francisco’s high school for the arts, which the students made into something like Asawa’s home — with mosaics, murals, and a garden that Asawa herself tended until her final years. “Sculpture is like farming,” she once said. “If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.”