It hardly seems possible that there could be a major 20th-century artist still ripe for rediscovery, but so it seems with the Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). Her work comes as a complete surprise, and not only because she has never been shown in this country before. Everything Asawa made was so original, and fashioned mainly out of wire – an art of pure visual joy.
Born in rural California, Asawa’s first exposure to art teaching came when her family and other Japanese-Americans were detained in internment camps during the second world war. After hostilities ended, she studied art at the famously experimental and non-hierarchical Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She began with ink drawing, both figurative and abstract. But in 1947, a Mexican craftsman taught Asawa how to weave baskets out of wire, and this knowledge inspired her own unique structures.
