This is A Story of Ruth Asawa, a weekly series that journeys through the life of the visionary artist, Ruth Asawa.
Ruth Asawa’s drive to create a better society was motivated by the impact of the racial discrimination she encountered throughout her life, memorably saying, “Sometimes good comes through adversity.”
Affirmative resilience shone through Asawa’s final major public art commission, the San Francisco Garden of Remembrance which, completed in 2002, was created to memorialise all Americans of Japanese ancestry who were sent to internment camps during World War II. Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, Mark Johnson, who worked on the project, recalled Asawa’s desire to celebrate the resilience of a thriving community who had faced trauma like her own. “She wanted to disperse boulders,” Johnson recalled, “and these boulders for her were memories or evocations of the internment camps.”
In 2008, her husband Albert Lanier died, he was the love of her life. Meanwhile, the public recognition of her artistic and civic contribution continued to grow and the art school she co-founded was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honour in 2010.
On 6 August 2013, Ruth Asawa died at home in San Francisco, aged 87. Her memorial was held in the city’s Golden Gate Park, a setting where she once taught her growing young children to draw the trees. “We, too, need to keep growing every moment of every day that we are on this earth,” teaches Asawa.
The summer of 2013 brought her first New York solo exhibition since 1958, a survey exhibition titled ‘Objects & Apparitions’. In 2017, curators Emma Ridgway and Vibece Salter agreed her first ever solo museum show outside of America, Ruth Asawa: Citizen Of The Universe. After multiple interruptions from the Covid 19 pandemic the exhibition is finally open for everyone to enjoy.
The free exhibition Ruth Asawa: Citizen of The Universe is on at Modern Art Oxford until 21 August 2022.
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Image credit: Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe at Modern Art Oxford, 2022. Photo by Oxford Atelier