May 1, 2019
Ruth Asawa was the featured artist in the Google Doodle, launched on the search engine’s homepage in the US, Ireland, Israel, and the UK. The special Asawa Doodle, drawn by Google staff artist Alyssa Winans, featured five of Asawa’s hanging wire sculptures, as well as a drawing of Asawa herself at work on a sixth, which forms the lowercase "g" of the Google logo. The Asawa Doodle remained live for 24 hours, and was seen by millions of people around the world.
Born in rural California in 1926, Asawa is best known for her looped-wire sculptures, which challenge conventional notions of material and form. She began creating the light, transparent works in the late 1940s while a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she was influenced in particular by her teachers Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. "I found myself experimenting with wire," Asawa explained: "I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space.... I realized that I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand, because a line can go anywhere."
Image: Ruth Asawa in her studio, 1956. Photo by Paul Hassel