Ruth Asawa’s Art of Defiant Hospitality

“It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have to do anything,” Asawa said later. She took art lessons from three interned Disney animators at a special school for camp children. In 1943, she was allowed to leave the camp in Arkansas and attend Teachers College in Milwaukee, where she hoped to become an art teacher, but she was barred from teaching in xenophobic local schools. A classmate encouraged her to try out Black Mountain College, a Bauhaus-inspired experiment in North Carolina where students farmed, studied and lived alongside their professors as equals.

Asawa flourished among the now legendary cohort. Among her classmates Ray Johnson And Robert Rauschenbergand among her professors were Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, John Cageand Albers, who, along with his wife Anni, took Asawa under his wing. She absorbed the lessons of Albers's transparency, Fuller's geodesic logic, and the agrarian spirit of the school, milking cows and churning butter to meet her quota of work and study. “We had to scramble,” she recalled of Black Mountain’s perpetual poverty. Near the beginning of the retrospective, you can see the colorful candy canes she made on the back of the envelope and a spiral print created from repeating laundry stamps.

She found a more lasting outlet for her geometric hobbies in the summer in Mexico, where she learned to “knit” with wire. In the markets of Toluca, vendors used this technique to make egg holders, but Asawa was fascinated by the transparency of the “insect wing” material. She started with simple baskets (one of which became a mailing tray for the Alberses) and soon discovered that by covering the molds, she could nest and layer them in endless permutations.

One of the great pleasures of the show is witnessing the Cambrian Explosion that took place in the fifties and sixties. At the beginning there are lowered spheres and dumbbells, hyperboloids of gold wire resembling crowns. She quickly begins to fold the shapes vertically, like seaweed leaves. Shapes float within shapes with a charming implausibility: how does a small sphere end up floating in a bowling pin that sits in what looks like the mouth of a pipe? Asawa worked from the inside out, pausing to close the form's navel so she could change course and wrap a second skin around it. She sought to evoke organic transformations, writing that “the sense of observing metamorphosis can be achieved by grouping related forms at studied distances from each other.”

Among the sculptures hanging throughout the exhibition, it's easy to miss the silver ribbon wrapped around the black pebbles. This is Asawa's engagement ring, designed by Fuller for her wedding to fellow Black Mountain student, Albert Lanier, in 1949. Over the next nine years, some of her most fruitful years as an artist, Asawa gave birth to six children, who played with her and even helped her in her work. “My home was and is my studio,” Asawa said of their home, where family friend, photographer Imogen Cunningham, often chronicled this intergenerational collaboration.

There was no big boundary between friendship, creativity and everyday life. After someone gave her a Death Valley plant, Asawa began making “tied wire sculptures” by tying together dozens of strands and then letting them fall apart into smaller bundles, reminiscent of a way to separate branches. Reminiscent of tumbleweeds and snowflake-like fractals, they are more angular and texturally varied than hanging forms. Asawa even experimented with electroplating, creating effects reminiscent of tree bark. Then, in 1985, lupus brought a premature end to her wire experiments. Undeterred, she turned to drawing and watercolors, often depicting plants from her garden. She also continued to sculpt from metal, although in a different way, and with someone else’s hands.

Being guided by your materials, in Asawa's opinion, was akin to raising children. “What you do becomes the background, just like a parent allows a child to express themselves,” she said. Sometimes the connection was more than just an analogy. Looking for a way to keep her children occupied, Asawa began mixing flour, salt and water with baker's clay, from which they formed small figures and lined them up on the family piano. In 1968, she introduced the technique to the Alvarado School Art Workshop, a program she co-founded to bring working artists into public classrooms. Her success attracted the attention of an architect, who soon asked her to design a fountain in Union Square.

“Andrea”, commissioned by developer William M. Roth for the redevelopment of San Francisco Square, 1966–1966.Artwork by Ruth Asawa / © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Contributed by David Zwirner; Photo by Aiko Cuneo.