I thought I knew Ruth Asawa. I had seen her mesmerizing looped-wire sculptures, sublimely suspended and living dichotomies of heft and fragility, darkness and light. I knew the Cliffs Notes of her life story—that as a teenager in the 1940s she was imprisoned in a concentration camp for Japanese Americans, yet another scourge of this country’s nationalized racism, and that she studied at the renowned Black Mountain College alongside marquee names of mid-20th-century art. I understood that the wider recognition she had begun to receive over the last decade was long overdue, and I joined the chorus of those thrilled to see her work featured on a collection of United States Postal Service stamps last year.
But a new show at David Zwirner gallery in New York highlights just how much more there is to Asawa’s story. “Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible,” organized by Helen Molesworth and running through December 18, aims to situate the artist within a wider context—both personal and historical—by including drawings and other three-dimensional objects alongside her looped-wire sculptures. Those other works further our understanding of Asawa: how her education, her activism, and her life as a mother, friend, and teacher deeply formed the art she produced, and how she produced it.
