Ruth Asawa: Doing Is Living

An artist, educator, and arts advocate, Ruth Asawa produced 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 postwar art in America.

Relentlessly experimental across a variety of mediums, Asawa moved effortlessly between abstract and figurative registers in both two and three dimensions, creating a vast and varied oeuvre that, despite its visual heterogeneity, reflects above all her belief in the total integration of artistic practice and family life.

Asawa is perhaps best known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. She began working with wire in the late 1940s, while still a student at Black Mountain College. The unique structure of these sculptures was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local artisans taught her how to create baskets out of wire.

Asawa’s near-constant devotion to creative pursuits and her distinct way of seeing the world around her is evidenced by her lesser-known drawings of the minutiae of everyday life. In 2023, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s lifelong drawing practice, offering an unparalleled window into her resourceful approach to drawing, with her particular attention to materials, line, surface, and space. The exhibition traveled to The Menil Collection, Houston, in 2024.

Asawa drew every day, while watching her children, attending public meetings as an arts advocate, observing her garden, and often late into the night. Her home was filled with impromptu sketches, in particular keenly observed images of plants and flowers, frequently from her own garden or brought to her by family and friends.

Executed in a number of intricate, interwoven configurations and at different scales and formats, the looped-wire sculptures in this presentation range from elaborate multilobed compositions to small spheres and billowing open-window forms that require extreme technical dexterity to achieve.

The exhibition also features works on paper whose geometric, patterned compositions are defined by a small number of basic shapes and motifs, recalling the design principles espoused by Albers that privilege the articulation of form through color. Like Asawa’s wire sculptures, these works on paper are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions.