That’s Not My Age

Photography by © 2016 Imogen Cunningham Trust

Good news! American sculptor Ruth Asawa has her first European retrospective at Modern Art Oxford. Like many over-looked female artists of the past, she is getting the recognition she deserves (her work is also included in this year’s Venice Biennale). The high ceiling of former industrial main gallery in Oxford shows her radical arrangements of looped-wire hanging sculptures (from the mid-1950s) to their best advantage. Grouped together, they’re lit dramatically, casting shadows on the white brick walls and white floor plinths. Others, formed of lengths of wire tied together and splayed like natural forms, look equally good in situ.

Image: Modern Art Oxford. Artwork © 2022 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy David Zwirner

Ruth Asawa (1926 to 2013) was born in California and created works from the mid-1940s until 1980. She was brought up modestly on a farm by her Japanese parents, but when a teenager – in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing of December 1941 – she and her family (among 100,000 west coast Japanese-Americans) were forced to relocate to an internment camp. There, in Rohwer, Arkansas, Ruth received some schooling, including art lessons.

Her luck and circumstances improved in 1946 when she went on a short course to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Further patronage and financial support enabled her to live and study there until 1949. Its respected art programme was run by the former Bauhaus master Josef Albers – alongside other émigré artists who fled the Nazis – and she was taught also by Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame). She said, “We were so poor that we were taking materials that were around us and using leaves and rocks and things that were natural rather than having good paper and materials …we had to scrounge around …and I think that was very good for us.”

She met her husband there – to-be-architect Albert Lanier – and they later settled in San Francisco, California (one of the few states that allowed interracial marriages). Ruth began working with industrial brass and copper wire – she had learned to use a type of crochet technique while visiting Mexico as an art student – and the shapes developed in complexity as she worked on them, “All of my wire sculptures are made from the same loop…the shape comes out of working with the wire.” She likened starting with a two-dimensional line and transforming it into a three-dimensional piece to “drawing in space.”

Image: Modern Art Oxford. Artwork © 2022 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy David Zwirner

This technique led to sculptural forms of great subtlety and beauty, which can be thoroughly appreciated viewed in-person. Moreover, she could work these in her home studio while she looked after her young children. Photographs in the exhibition by her friend Imogen Cunningham show her constructing these wire spheres surrounded by four of her six children

In the 1960s and 1970s her work branched out, quite literally, into tied wire compositions, some examples of which are also featured in this exhibition. Whether wall hung or free-standing, they are based on natural forms of high originality. Later work in the San Francisco area included commissions for public fountains in bronze.

Image: Modern Art Oxford. Artwork © 2022 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy David Zwirner

The Oxford exhibition contains a comprehensive survey of the wire sculptures, her print-making and drawings. Fortunately, MAO has created one of the best virtual art tours I have ever seen of this exhibition. Wherever in the world you are, it is possible to engage with the works on show through their  website and have a fantastic armchair-gallery experience. I highly recommend seeing Ruth Asawa’s beautiful artwork in any way possible.

Exhibition showing at Modern Art Oxford until 21 August 2022 – all information HERE. Entry is free.

Buy the Ruth Asawa, Citizen of the Universe book HERE.