The White House
October 21, 2024
The White House has announced that Ruth Asawa will be a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award given to artists and art patrons. Established in 1984, the National Medal of Arts is presented by the President of the United States to those who are “deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the United States.” Asawa is only the second visual artist to receive this high honor posthumously.
President Joe Biden will honor the award recipients in a ceremony at the White House on October 21, 2024.
American artist, educator, and arts advocate Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Born in rural California, Asawa first studied under professional artists while her family and other people of Japanese descent were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, sixteen months later, she enrolled in 1943 in Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa continued to produce 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.
An exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by Ruth Asawa, titled Doing Is Living, opens on November 19 at David Zwirner Hong Kong.
Learn more at the National Endowment for the Arts.
