Ruth Asawa: The Journal

About Ruth Asawa

Born in rural California American artist educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa (19262013) was first exposed to professional artists while her family and other Japanese Americans were detained at Santa Anita California in 1942. In 1946 Asawa began to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawas 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.