San Francisco is a city of heights and fog and light — crossing a street can sometimes feel like stepping from darkness into pure blue sky. Standing in her living room, flooded by the midday sun, the city unspooling below, I was able to conjure a black-and-white 1995 photograph that depicted how Asawa’s most important sculptures were hung in her home (many have since been placed in prominent museums and collections). Her children told me anecdotes, collected over the years: Asawa was fond of pointing at her sculptures, constellations in her own universe, and remarking that “this one is a seminal piece,” “that one should go to a museum.” “Somehow,” Addie Lanier told me, “She knew that the works would get there.” The children are now middle-aged and parents themselves; they had devoted years to caring for their parents at the end of their lives. I sensed how overwhelmed they had been by what had been left behind — they told stories of uncovering lesser artwork stuffed into basement crawl spaces, of painstakingly cataloging scores of photographs of their mother by her friend the photographer Imogen Cunningham that had never been published. It made me think of my own parents, of the duty a child feels to her elders, of the abundance of life and then the quiet that comes after death. Their mother, they said, used to hang her feet off the side of her father’s horse-drawn leveler, creating undulating patterns in the dirt that would eventually be repeated in her work. They were protective of their mother’s legacy. They understood what was at stake as custodians. They told me how, after she had taken a class with Albers, their mother told him she didn’t want to paint what he wanted her to paint. She wanted to paint flowers instead. “Fine,” Albers had replied. “But make them Asawa flowers.” The clarity of her own existence was obvious.
