Organized by Helen Molesworth
David Zwirner is pleased to present Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Organized by Helen Molesworth, this exhibition aims to situate Asawa’s (1926–2013) iconic looped- and tied-wire sculptures in the context of her extraordinary drawings and her lesser known sculptural forms, offering viewers one of the most comprehensive looks at this artist’s work to date. This larger context illuminates an artist in pursuit of form as a means to reshape how we see and perceive the world as well as offering a model for thinking about the avant-garde’s long-held desire to place art and life in a permanently dynamic conversation.
The Estate of Ruth Asawa has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017. The gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition of the artist’s work took place the same year in New York. In 2020, the gallery’s London location presented Ruth Asawa: A Line Can Go Anywhere, which was the first major presentation of the artist’s work outside of the United States. In 2022, Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe will open at Modern Art Oxford, England, and will subsequently travel to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway.
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Image: Ruth Asawa, c. 1951 (detail). Photograph © Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“The life of the artist-scientist-explorer … is truly the only life worth living. You give me courage—just the word ‘Ruth’ gives me an ‘all is possible’ feeling.”
—Albert Lanier, Asawa’s future husband, in a letter to the artist in 1948
Ruth Asawa, Doors (S.528, Carved Redwood Doors for Asawa-Lanier Home in San Francisco, CA), 1961. Photo by Xavier Lanier. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Ruth Asawa, Doors (S.528, Carved Redwood Doors for Asawa-Lanier Home in San Francisco, CA), 1961. Photo by Xavier Lanier. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Letter to Ruth Asawa from Albert Lanier, November 22, 1948. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Letter to Ruth Asawa from Albert Lanier, November 22, 1948. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa and her husband, Albert Lanier, outside the front door of their Noe Valley, San Francisco, home, 1984. Photo © Estate Phiz Mezey. Courtesy Phiz Mezey Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Ruth Asawa and her husband, Albert Lanier, outside the front door of their Noe Valley, San Francisco, home, 1984. Photo © Estate Phiz Mezey. Courtesy Phiz Mezey Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Ruth Asawa’s art and life were deeply intertwined—even her San Francisco home opened with a pair of enormous redwood doors she hand-carved with her children over the summer of 1961. The doors’ intricate, wavelike “meander” pattern recalls the works on paper Asawa made as a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (BMC.58, Meander – Curved Lines), c. 1948 (detail). Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (BMC.58, Meander – Curved Lines), c. 1948 (detail). Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“Ruth Asawa is best known for her hanging lobed sculptures and her abstract drawings of meanders made under the influence of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. Less known are her representational drawings of her beloved family, her ceramic face masks of her rich community in San Francisco, and her near-daily drawings of the plants and flowers from her ample garden.
Many of these works have never been shown publicly and this exhibition aims to recast Asawa as an artist as interested in representation as she was in abstraction, as compelled by the drawn line as the sculptural form, an artist perpetually curious about the intimate relationship between what the eye sees and what the hand can produce.”
—Helen Molesworth, curator and writer
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks), c. 1966–2000 (detail), and Untitled (S.540), 1950s. Photo by Laurence Cuneo. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks), c. 1966–2000 (detail), and Untitled (S.540), 1950s. Photo by Laurence Cuneo. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
Ruth Asawa casting a child’s face, c. 1970. Photo by Allen Nomura. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa casting a child’s face, c. 1970. Photo by Allen Nomura. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa with life masks on the exterior wall of her house. Photo © Terry Schmitt. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
Ruth Asawa with life masks on the exterior wall of her house. Photo © Terry Schmitt. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
Asawa cast the faces of hundreds of people within her community and kept a twenty-five-pound bag of plaster of Paris in her kitchen for this purpose.
“Asawa’s aesthetic philosophy reflects a synthesis of her personal and professional histories, which, like the meander design, were in many ways intertwined.”
—Tamara H. Schenkenberg, curator, Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Asawa’s undulating “meander” pattern, created with a spiraling line, suggests a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms akin to the interplay of inside and outside that the artist would later conjure in her “continuous” looped-wire sculptures.
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
“I was interested in [wire] because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. 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.”
—Ruth Asawa
Asawa’s impact on her community was profound. The communal living that she knew from her childhood on a farm and her experiences at Black Mountain College made Asawa value and acknowledge community involvement as an important aspect of her public art.
Her six-lobed continuous form Untitled (S.237) (c. 1958) was originally owned by Mae Lee, Asawa’s friend, neighbor, and sometimes assistant who helped her with a number of her public commissions, working alongside Asawa’s family and community volunteers.
Ruth Asawa with daughter Aiko and assistant Mae Lee at Andrea, her fountain in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco, 1968. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa with daughter Aiko and assistant Mae Lee at Andrea, her fountain in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco, 1968. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
The rafters of Ruth Asawa’s home were filled with her wire sculptures and the artist would sit beneath them as she worked. Living room of the Asawa-Lanier home, 1995. Photo © Laurence Cuneo. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
The rafters of Ruth Asawa’s home were filled with her wire sculptures and the artist would sit beneath them as she worked. Living room of the Asawa-Lanier home, 1995. Photo © Laurence Cuneo. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
“Her creative genius endowed her with the ability to repurpose whatever she has experienced. In her original synthesis of form, process, and transparency, Asawa has created a diverse body of work that challenges the historical definition of sculpture. Whatever threatened to block her progress instead helped her to become an artist without peer.”
—John Yau, poet and art critic
“Because I had the children, I chose to have my studio in my home. I wanted them to understand my work and learn how to work.”
—Ruth Asawa
Xavier Lanier crouching in front of Untitled (S.283), 1953. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Xavier Lanier crouching in front of Untitled (S.283), 1953. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“We always saw her making art, it was part of her everyday existence. I never thought of her making art as a separate activity. To us, she wasn’t working. We didn’t have to be quiet so she could concentrate. Her art-making space was always in our house.”
—Aiko Cuneo, Asawa’s daughter
An excerpt from Ruth Asawa: Of Forms and Growth, directed by Robert Snyder, 1978. © Masters and Masterworks Productions, Inc.
Asawa often made her looped-wire sculptures while sitting at her kitchen table or looking after her children. Her home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley had an eighteen-foot vaulted ceiling where looped- and tied-wire sculptures hung from the rafters.
Ruth Asawa and her children at home on Saturn Street, San Francisco, 1957. Photograph © Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Ruth Asawa and her children at home on Saturn Street, San Francisco, 1957. Photograph © Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Asawa had a near-constant devotion to creative pursuits and a distinct way of seeing the world around her, evidenced by her lesser-known drawings of the minutiae of everyday life. Her portrayals of sleeping children, garden plants, and cane and wicker chairs—as well as the ceramic masks of her friends and many visitors to her home—provide an intimate glimpse into the day to day.
Ruth Asawa with Aiko and Xavier, c. 1951. Photograph © Imogen Cunningham Trust
Ruth Asawa with Aiko and Xavier, c. 1951. Photograph © Imogen Cunningham Trust
Asawa drew every day, while watching her children, attending public meetings as an activist, observing her garden, and often late into the night. Her home was filled with impromptu sketches, whether a drawing on a paper towel made while attending a meeting at the School of the Arts, or a rose drawn on a brown paper bag.
“If we think about Asawa’s early sculptures in concert with her history of making casts of her friends’ and family’s faces and we combine that with her work to bring artists into the San Francisco public schools, can we connect the dots of her concerns as being deeply immersed in the idea that art and life are deeply intertwined, which would in turn allow us to see her as interested in repetition and difference both as a modernist trope and as a structuring feature of being the mother of six children, who by their very existence and actuality are a living embodiment of the repetition and difference enabled by DNA?”
—Helen Molesworth
An excerpt from Ruth Asawa: Of Forms and Growth, directed by Robert Snyder, 1978. © Masters and Masterworks Productions, Inc.
Asawa was raised on a farm in Norwalk, California, and had a lifelong love of observing plants and nature, which she often drew from life. She also loved gardening and helped promote community gardening in San Francisco, setting up programs for children, schools, and communities.
Ruth Asawa watering her vegetable garden at her Noe Valley home, c. 1976. Photo © Philip Chan. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa watering her vegetable garden at her Noe Valley home, c. 1976. Photo © Philip Chan. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
“My curiosity was aroused by the idea of giving structural form to the images in my drawings. These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”
—Ruth Asawa
“Our first identity was always to the arts community. When I think of my childhood, I think of my parents’ friends, who were always artists, architects, draftsmen, gardeners, and their kids.”
—Addie Lanier, Asawa’s daughter
Ruth Asawa with schoolchildren in the garden of her Noe Valley home, c. 1976. Photo by Laurence Cuneo. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa with schoolchildren in the garden of her Noe Valley home, c. 1976. Photo by Laurence Cuneo. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
“Doing is living. That is all that matters.”
—Ruth Asawa
Ruth Asawa drawing flowers on the deck of her Noe Valley home. Photo © Bob Turner. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Ruth Asawa drawing flowers on the deck of her Noe Valley home. Photo © Bob Turner. Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
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