This is A Story of Ruth Asawa, a weekly series that journeys through the life of the visionary artist, Ruth Asawa.
After three years, Ruth Asawa left the community of Black Mountain College in 1949 and joined her fiancé Albert Lanier in San Francisco. The pair were married during a time when California was one of the only US states in which interracial marriage was legal. In the years that followed, Asawa worked from her home studio, combining artmaking with raising a family of six children. She received recognition and exhibited her sculptures, paintings, and drawings in a number of solo and group shows.
Ruth Asawa reflected back on this busy period of life when she was in her late sixties, her honest words mirroring many of the challenges facing women today. “Women often tell me they gave up art to raise a family, or gave up having a family to become an artist,” Asawa wrote. “I also asked myself some scary questions: ‘what if I gave up marriage and family life for a career and ended up being a mediocre artist, or what if I gave up a career for a family, and the marriage went sour…? I decided to try it all: marriage, children, teaching, art, and gardening.”
Hard work was an essential element of an artistic and productive life and Asawa expected this of herself, but also sought to provide opportunities for her own and other people’s children to learn the skills necessary to be able to work creatively. The artist’s young children were expected to collaborate with her in creative and practical activities, from helping to coil the wire for her sculptures to jointly carving the wooden doors for their home. Asawa’s family and friends were markedly present in her life, and even had a strikingly permanent presence on the exterior walls of her home in the form of hundreds of handmade ceramic face masks, created by the artist from the 1960s until 2000.
Continue A Story of Ruth Asawa next week, where we’ll explore the artist’s impact and legacy in her San Francisco community. Follow the story here on MAO Studio and also on the Modern Art Oxford Instagram feed between 23 June – 21 August 2022.
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Image 1: Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Asawa in Her Dining Room with Tied-Wire Sculpture, 1963. © 2022 Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / ARS, NY and DACS, London. Courtesy David Zwirner
Image 2: Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, and Her Children, 1957. © 2022 Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / ARS, NY and DACS, London. Courtesy David Zwirner