“We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.” Ruth Asawa In 1954, Asawa was asked to explain her work for her first show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. What set her work apart from others making sculpture then was their lightness and transparency, as well as their movement since they were suspended from the ceiling. She wrote, “A woven mesh not unlike medieval mail. A continuous piece of wire, forms envelop inner forms, yet all forms are visible (transparent). The shadow will reveal and exact image of the object.” “I started in 1962 when a friend of ours brought a desert plant from Death Valley and said, ‘Here’s something for you to draw.’ I tried to draw it, but it was such a tangle that I had to construct it in wire in order to draw it. And then I got the idea that I could use it as a way to work in wire. I began to see all the possibilities: opening up the center and then making it flat on the wall, and putting it on a stand.” Asawa often describes these tied-wired sculptures using terms such as “tree” and “branching form.” She began with a center stem of 200 to 1,000 wires, which she then divided into branches using nature as her model. As she continued working in this form, she moved into more abstract forms using geometric centers of four, five, six, and seven points. If you look at these sculptures, you can see how the number of points in the center defines the forms that the branches take. As with her other work, these tied wire forms gave her the freedom to explore how “the relation between outside and inside was interdependent, integral.” Beginning in the mid-1950s, Asawa sought advice on how best to clean her looped-wire sculptures from industrial plating companies in San Francisco. The brass, iron, and copper were beginning to tarnish and oxidize. She found help from C&M Plating Works and experiment with cleaning methods and patinas. On a trip to the platers in the early 1960s, Asawa noticed some crusty copper bars in the plating tank, the byproduct of a process that smoothed the chrome from car bumpers. She admired their gritty texture and green patina. Through trial and error, Asawa, working with the platers reversed the electroplating process. After she formed the sculpture in copper wire, it remained in the chemical tank for months, where it grew layers of rough, green an colorful textured skin similar to coral or bark. Asawa began experimenting with cast forms in the mid 1960s. For her first public commission, the Andrea mermaids fountain in Ghirardelli Square, she had to design the mermaid’s tail. Her solution was to first loop it in wire, then dip it in wax, and then cast it in bronze. She enjoyed working with the foundrymen at the San Francisco Art Foundry, and she was captivated by how she could take an idea from one material, add to it with wax, have it invested or made into a mold, and then see it transformed into bronze. She did this with wire, paper, baker’s clay, even persimmon stems. Her cast sculptures reaffirmed when she learned from her teacher Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, “The artist must discover the uniqueness and integrity of the material.” From the article, “Is this the most beautiful show of the year?” written by Sebastian Smee dated September 19, 2018 and published in The Washington Post the following: St. Louis — The year’s most beautiful exhibition — yes, it’s September, but I’m willing to make the call now — is a survey of suspended hanging sculptures and works on paper by Ruth Asawa at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. I write this less than an hour after leaving “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work,” so forgive me if I sound effusive. But I wager you wouldn’t demur. Out in the haze and heat shimmer of late[1]summer St. Louis, my body still hums with an unfamiliar sensation — of weightlessness, transparency and an almost rude elegance. Asawa’s sculptures are intricate, organic-seeming things, made from crocheted copper, brass, galvanized steel and iron wire. They have an aura of casual prowess and the concision of crunched-down equations describing the curves of water droplets or summer weeds shooting skyward in spirals. You don’t expect sculpture to function as a visual correlative to swimming in air. Asawa found a way and, in so doing, found her voice. The show has been installed across four galleries in the Pulitzer’s Tadao Ando-designed building. The main gallery, which creates a snaking path through a relaxed cluster of elongated hanging forms, is especially fine, and a reminder that Asawa loved the way her sculptures cast shadows and interacted with their siblings. One of seven children herself, she hated to see anything is isolation. Asawa was born to Japanese parents in a rural area outside Los Angeles in 1926. Her family grew vegetables, which they sold at market in L.A. On Saturdays, she and her siblings attended a Japanese school, learning the language and culture — including brush[1]and-ink calligraphy. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FBI agents arrested her father, Umakichi, and detained him in New Mexico for two years. Ruth wouldn’t see him again for more than six years. Two months later, the rest of the family was interned in the stables at a racetrack in Arcadia, California, along with 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, more than half of them (like Asawa) American citizens. In the camp at Arcadia, Asawa met three men who had worked as animators for Walt Disney. They taught her to draw. After six months, the family — still missing Umakichi — was relocated to Arkansas, where Ruth finished high School. A $100 scholarship from a Quaker woman living in Pennsylvania got her to Milwaukee State Teachers College. She studied to be an art teacher while working as a domestic servant. Asawa has one of those life stories that threatens to overwhelm the impact of the work. Until, that is, you see the work. It has been easily visible in San Francisco — at the de Young and elsewhere — for years. In 1968, Asawa made her first representational sculpture, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square. The commission increased her local popularity — so much so that she became known as “the fountain lady.” But it may have set back her art world reputation. A broader, more discerning appreciation of Asawa’s work, and a recognition that she was under appreciated for most of her lifetime, has been building since 2011, when curator Helen Molesworth included her in “Dance/Draw,” a group show at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Two years later, she was given her first solo show in New York since 1958. By then, Asawa was 87 and had been battling lupus for almost 30 years. She died three months later at her home in San Francisco. In the five years since, resurgent interest in Black Mountain College, the small, experimental liberal arts college in North Carolina that had an outsize impact on midcentury art, dance, music and poetry, has continued to fuel the fascination with Asawa. Encouraged by someone she met in Mexico, she attended Black Mountain in the late 1940s in the company of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller. Her was experiences may partly explain this. She encountered appalling intolerance, both then and later, but she told an interviewer in 1994: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one.” Rather than overturning Asawa’s inner creative convictions, Black Mountain’s Bauhaus-inspired ethos gave them a chance to put down roots. Asawa had come there after a 1945 bus trip to Mexico with her sister Lois. Returning to Mexico two summers later, she saw craftsmen in Toluca making wire baskets for carrying eggs. She asked to be taught the technique and returned to Black Mountain with her life’s work implanted within her, like a secret algorithm awaiting the input of life’s data. At first, she used the technique to make baskets, but she quickly adapted it to create closed[1]form hanging sculptures with undulating hourglass or teardrop shapes. Asked to account for these voluptuous, symmetrical forms, she connected them to the lines her shifting toes had made in the sand when, as a child, she rode on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment. But they were inspired, too, by forms in nature: “plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.” Lest one think Asawa, while meditating on all these phenomena, was living the solitary life of a Zen adept in a mountaintop monastery, she wasn’t. She had met and married Albert Lanier, an architecture student, at Black Mountain. They had six children. Determined to keep the various aspect of her life integrated rather than compartmentalized, Asawa made her work in the midst of the family maelstrom. The sophistication of her sculptural forms, derived from her drawings, advanced quickly. She began nesting spherical forms inside hourglass shape and created elaborate interplays of inside and outside that can bend your brain if you try to figure them out. Beginning with a smaller form like a sphere, she would stop short of closing it at its base and instead fold it upward so that the sphere’s exterior surface became the interior of the bigger, encompassing shape. She might repeat that inversion several times in the same sculpture. Often, her fluting or tapering forms travel through one another from inside to outside and back again. The nesting and interwoven surfaces produce variations in density and thus in light and shade. Asawa paid careful attention to all this, as well as to the shadows her works cast. She used different-colored wire to produce different effects. She loved that air could move freely through her work. From closed forms, she went on to experiment with forms that opened out, such as flowers with frilled edges or seaweed. She also tied bunches of wire with knots, dividing them out into thinner and thinner branches, so that the whole came to resemble giant dandelions or the tips of trees in winter. She submerged some of the tied wire works in sulfuric acid for weeks at a time, echoing the crusty, greenish growths that formed on the surfaces. Asawa’s works on paper, concentrated in the lower gallery, are mostly in black and white or blue but sometimes in saturated colors, too. They’re unified not by style or technique but by a persistent curiosity about effects of transparency and movement and a feeling for the simple, childlike delights of forms multiplied, repeated, and extended. While somewhat unusual, this appraiser believes it important to provide information provided by the Ruth Asawa Home Web Page (ruthasawa.com) on the proper handling of her artwork, especially her large looped wire sculptures of which this appraisal is about. While the information below is from the Web Page, one should first read the Web Page for possible updated information, and consult with professional art handlers before moving or installing artwork of this nature, and not rely solely upon the information presented below. FROM THE WEB PAGE: Sculpture Facts 1) They are fragile even though they are made of flexible wire. 2) They are not collapsible. Once the wire loops bend, they stay bent until they are conserved to their original form (and rebounding wire can affect patina). 3) They are not heavy. Small sculptures can weigh only a few pounds. Longer, bulkier pieces can weigh between 20-35 lbs. The largest pieces may be only 50 lbs. 4) The safest position is vertical, suspended by a hanging wire and swivel at the top of the sculpture. The Best Art Handlers We’ve Observed 1) Have good flexibility and physical agility. These two traits are more important than strength since the sculptures are reasonable lightweight. 2) Work as a team and are willing to take the time to read these instruction. 3) Rehearse how they will move the sculpture in advance, with ladders (or lifts) in position to reduce the amount of time a sculpture must be carried. WARNING to ART HANDLERS 1) Never rest a sculpture on the floor. This may cause the larger, round lobes to become deformed. 2) Never pick up a sculpture without knowing exactly where it will hang and exactly how it will get to the hanging hook. 3) Always wrap the narrow necks with tissue paper and bubble wrap before attempting to move the sculpture. 4) Never move an Asawa sculpture by holding the larger, round lobes. 5) Take particular care to protect lobes with interior forms, as these are so much more difficult, if not impossible, to conserve. 6) When moving the sculpture either vertically or horizontally, never allow the lobes to collapse into each other (or jam up). The suspension should be maintained so that the lobes do not collapse up or down into one another. Installation from the crate in vertical position (preferred) 1) Move the packing crate as close as possible to where the sculpture will hand. 2) Attach a rope and pulley to the hanging hook in the ceiling to raise the sculpture from the crate up to the desired position. 3) Attach one end of the rope temporarily to a hanging wire at the top of the sculpture’s swivel. 4) Have one handler raise the sculpture, with other handlers gently guiding the sculpture out of the crate. 5) By using a rope and pulley, the sculpture is lifted from the top hanging mechanism, which maintains the sculpture’s tension and lessens the chance of damage to the lobes by mishandling. 6) Finalize the hanging mechanism with the sculpture securely tied off. Installation from the crate in a horizontal position (if necessary) 1) 3-4 haulers should rehearse how the sculpture will be moved from its horizontal crate to its final installation spot, including, A) insuring that any pulleys, installation S-hooks, or other hanging aids are prepared in advance. B) knowing the path the handlers will take (doors, steps, corners) C) proper placement of ladders or lifts, and the ability to move up and down them even if both hands are supporting the sculpture. D) Making any required tools readily available. E) understanding that whoever controls the top of the sculpture, does the lifting. The other handlers simply guide and assist, but never lift upward. In the diagram right, there are four handlers. Blue is controlling the pulley and does the lifting. Red holds the hanging wire and first neck; green cradles the 2nd and 3rd necks, and pink cradles the last neck and the bottom lobe. The narrow necks are protected by tissue paper and bubble wrap which is removed only after the sculpture is in its vertical position. When moving the sculpture, keep the looped sculpture as straight as possible. Prevent the necks from bending by having the handlers move in tandem (baby steps) while maintaining the tension of the overall sculpture. The necks are the most flexible parts of the sculpture, but over-bending them (or allowing them to jam up or collapse into the adjacent lobes) can damage the wire looping. In the diagram to the right, the handler controlling the pulley easily raises the sculpture into its vertical position. The other handlers cradle the necks gently and guide the sculpture as it becomes vertical. Let the handler pulling the rope do the lifting. Once the sculpture is raised into position, you can tie off the rope and finalize the installations. Examples of Improper Handling Below, the lobe above the neck The handler did not has been damaged. Most likely lift the sculpture by the handler held onto the neck The handler held the sculpture hanging wire. and lifted upward, jamming by the exterior lobe, denting the Instead he grabbed and crusting the wire into the looping and deforming its the top of the upper lobe. symmetry. sculpture causing the looping. Securing the sculpture in position Once you have raised the sculpture to the desired position, use a woven leader wire/cable that is attached to the top loop of the swivel found at the top of the sculpture. We recommend using a heavy cable with 2 metal sleeves tightly crimped at each end of the cable. Once the cable and sleeves have been attached to the sculpture and ceiling hook, you can remove any additional installation aids (pulley and rope, S-hooks, etc.)
