Description

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Featuring Ruth Asawa’s stunning looped-wire sculptures, this journal is a welcome reminder to find inspiration in the everyday object.

The twentieth-century master Ruth Asawa is renowned for her hand-looped and tied-wire sculptures that explore the interplay of light and shadow. Asawa also produced an enormous body of works on paper, finding moments to weave her creative practice into the fabric of her daily life, depicting her California garden, her family, and her home. The delicate works featured in Asawa’s first Artist Journal beckon the inner artist to carve out time to look and create.

About the Author

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Born in rural California, American artist, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was first exposed to professional artists while her family and other Japanese Americans were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, eighteen months later, she enrolled in 1943 in Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa’s time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. She also met architectural student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949 and with whom she would raise a large family and build a career in San Francisco. Asawa continued to produce art steadily over the course of more than a half century, creating a cohesive body of sculptures and works on paper that, in their innovative use of material and form, deftly synthesizes a wide range of aesthetic preoccupations at the heart of twentieth-century abstraction.