The Telegraph, feature by Lucy Davies
February 13, 2020
“Asawa—an American artist—lived and worked in this cedar-shingled Craftsman (the US version of Arts and Crafts) house from 1960 until she died in 2013, at the age of 87. Besides creating a vast body of work - chiefly abstract sculptures, but also paintings and drawings—she and her husband, the noted architect Albert Lanier, who died in 2008, raised six children here. Paul, the youngest, recently turned 60. To reach the house, you follow a meandering path upwards, across a sort of bridge, to a deck and into the kitchen.
[...]
Back in the kitchen, I'm given Asawa's favourite chair to sit on, with a view into the living room, which is, without question, the house's star attribute: with a huge fireplace and soaring rafters; lit by a grand bay window through which the sun falls in chiselled bars. Its ceiling is so tall because when the house was built in 1908, it had to accommodate the pipe organ played by the owner's wife. In Asawa's day, these same rafters were strung with scores of her wire sculptures—some finished, others still in progress. Most have gone to the de Young now, though the nails they hung from remain. She would sit beneath them as she wove.”
Read the full feature in The Telegraph
Ruth Asawa: A Line Can Go Anywhere is on view at David Zwirner London through February 22, 2020.
Image: Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, and Her Children, 1957 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham. © Imogen Cunningham