Bringing together works from across Asawa's career, this expansive and beautifully illustrated volume examines her output both as an artist and as a passionate advocate for arts education.
Everything She Touched recounts the incredible life of the American sculptor Ruth Asawa. This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices—family, friends, teachers, and critics—to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist. Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer's daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She survived adolescence in the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and attended the groundbreaking art school at Black Mountain College. Asawa then went on to develop her signature hanging-wire sculptures, create iconic urban installations, revolutionize arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, fight through lupus, and defy convention to nurture a multiracial family. • A richly visual volume with over 60 reproductions of Asawa's art and archival photos of her life (including portraits shot by her friend, the celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham) • Documents Asawa's transformative touch—most notably by turning wire – the material of the internment camp fences – into sculptures • Author Marilyn Chase mined Asawa's letters, diaries, sketches, and photos and conducted interviews with those who knew her to tell this inspiring story. Ruth Asawa forged an unconventional path in everything she did—whether raising a multiracial family of six children, founding a high school dedicated to the arts, or pursuing her own practice independent of the New York art market. Her beloved fountains are now San Francisco icons, and her signature hanging-wire sculptures grace the MoMA, de Young, Getty, Whitney, and many more museums and galleries across America. • Ruth Asawa's remarkable life story offers inspiration to artists, art lovers, feminists, mothers, teachers, Asian Americans, history buffs, and anyone who loves a good underdog story. • A perfect gift for those interested in Asian American culture and history • Great for those who enjoyed Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel, Ruth Asawa: Life's Work by Tamara Schenkenberg, and Notes and Methods by Hilma af Klint
From the Japanese-American internment camps to the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, Ruth Asawa's life journey is one filled with challenges and obstacles turned into triumphs through perseverance and a unique vision. -- Provided by publisher
Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was an influential and award-winning sculptor, a beloved figure in the Bay Area art world, and a devoted activist who advocated tirelessly for arts education. This lushly illustrated book by collage artist Andrea D'Aquino brings Asawa's creative journey to life, detailing the influence of her childhood in a farming family, and her education at Black Mountain College where she pursued an experimental course of education with leading avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Anni and Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Delightful and substantial, this engaging title for young art lovers includes a page of teaching tools for parents and educators.
Revealing rarely seen work alongside her iconic looped-wire sculptures, this catalogue celebrates Ruth Asawa’s unique vision and intimate subject matter. Known for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and “continuous” looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre to date––ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping––all providing an expansive look into the artist’s life. A document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa’s spectacular oeuvre. With an introduction by Molesworth, this book features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.
Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers’s legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground. Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist’s work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more. Together the body of work demonstrates the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials will illustrate a chronology of the artist’s life and work. Featuring an extensive text by Tiffany Bell which explores the artist’s influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa’s work in relation to mid-twentieth century art history, culture, and scientific theory.
Half theWorld traces the ways in which women artists deftly transformed the language of sculpture to invent radically new forms and processes that privileged studio practice, tactility and the artist's hand. The volume seeks to identify the multiple strains of proto-feminist practices, characterized by abstraction and repetition, which rejected the singularity of the masterwork and rearranged sculptural form to be contingent upon the way the body moved around it in space. The catalogue begins in the immediate post-war era, with the first section spanning the late 1950s through the 1950s. Featuring historically important predecessors including Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Claire Falkenstein and Louise Nevelson, this section examines abstraction based on the human figure and the influence of the unconscious. The second section covers the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and includes Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lynda Benglis, Heidi Bucher, Gego, François Grossen, Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks, Marisa Merz, Mira Schendel, Michelle Stuart, Hannah Wilke, and Jackie Winsor, a generation of post-minimalist artists who ignited a revolution in their use of process-oriented materials and methods. In the 1980s and 1990s, the period explored in the third section, artists Phyllida Barlow, Isa Genzken, Cristina Iglesias, Liz Larner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Senga Nengudi, and Ursula von Rydingsvard moved beyond singular, three-dimensional objects toward architectonic works characterized by repetition, structure, and design. The final section is comprised of post-2000 works by artists Karla Black, Abigail DeVille, Sonia Gomes, Rachel Khedoori, Lara Schnitger, Shinique Smith, and Jessica Stockholder, artists who create installation-based environments, embracing domestic materials and craft as an embedded discourse.
Historically, major women artists have been excluded from the mainstream art canon. Aligned with the resurgence of feminism in pop culture, Broad Strokes offers an entertaining corrective to that omission. Art historian Bridget Quinn delves into the lives and careers of 15 female artists from around the globe in text that's smart, feisty, educational, and an enjoyable read. Replete with beautiful reproductions of the artists' works and contemporary portraits of each artist by renowned illustrator Lisa Congdon, this is art history from the Renaissance to Abstract Expressionism for the modern art lover, reader, and feminist.
This exhibition catalog accompanies the inaugural exhibition at the new UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific FIlm Archive building, designed by Diller Scofido + Renfro. Over 150 works of art in a wide range of media, as well as scientific illustrations and architectural drawings and models, explore the ways that architecture--as concept, metaphor, and practice--illuminates various aspects of life experience.