Name: Ruth Asawa: documentary on an artist who worked every minute | HOW TO SEE
Uploaded: 2026-02-06T05:41:07.000Z
Duration: 16 min 25 s
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Adverbs of degree

Ruth Asawa is an artist whose generosity of spirit really comes through in her work.

She offers kind of model for how to see the world.

Reflexive pronouns

Asawa herself said that everything is connected, continuous.

If you zoom out and you look at Asawa's nearly six decade career, you find the sense of boundarylessness between art and life.

Really everything and anything was on the table for art.

My parents moved here when I was one in 1960, so I know where all the light switches are.

Her long looped wire pieces hung right from that beam.

And it was convenient because if she had five or 10 minutes, she could also watch what's cooking at the same time as she was working on her sculptures.

You see her running to the back of the truck, throwing in the milk carton structure and then driving off the hill.

I've never met anyone who worked harder than her in my life.

I've always been interested in the narrative, in the story of her life.

She was born to Japanese immigrant parents.

So wake up, have breakfast, go work in the fields, come back in, change your clothes, go to school, come back home, change her clothes again, go back into the fields, work until dark.

The great benefit of that is that she really lived in nature and she understood cycles of nature.

Sunrise, planting, growth, harvest, decay, composting, and then sunset.

And that kind of went on until she was 15, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

In two months, her father was taken by the FBI.

And then in two months more, her mother and the rest of her siblings, they were incarcerated.

All of the college students and professional people also in turn were the Disney animators.

And so she got to draw with practicing artists for the first time.

This was my first experience with it in a serious way, of how an artist works.

So in 1946, Ruth Asawa arrived at Black Mountain College, which was a multi disciplinary experimental college in North Carolina.

It was really at Black Mountain that she felt she first learned how to see.

You worked in your jeans during the day and worked on the farm, and

you went to your class and you studied and you talked and you argued with your teachers.

And then at night, the teachers and the students performed together and they ate together.

The faculty that summer was Joseph Albers, eventually Merce Cunningham.

Black Mountain really influenced my whole approach.

When Albers gave a class saying paper, you weren't talking about going from paper, which is not very important, and

Next you go into glass, and the next you go to wood.

And then finally you graduate to plastics, because that's sort of the modern material.

But we always went from paper to paper to paper to paper, to make paper do what it hasn't done yet.

What he was talking about was abstracting from the material.

Rather than being concerned with your own design ideas and forcing something into it.

What you do is you become backbone, just like a parent allows the child to express himself, and

During this time at Black Mountain, ASOA really begins to explore the potential of these everyday materials.

Gathering leaves and turning them into compositions.

She uses a laundry stamp from the school, school's laundry room, inscribed with the school's initials, BMC While a student at Black Mountain, Asawa spent one summer teaching in Toluca, Mexico.

She happened upon a wire basket in a crafts market.

She asked a local craftsperson to teach her the technique, which she then adapted.

She also really understood baling wire and chicken wire and galvanized wire.

She was tying things up to fence, she was repairing crates.

Wire is like the most logical thing for her to become fascinated with.

Asawa's most consequential contribution to the history of art in the 20th century is a formal innovation that she makes around 1951, which she calls the continuous form within a form.

The surface that develops from the bottom up, always begin from the inside and then go on up, then doubles back on itself.

And then it becomes the inside surface of the next form to form another sphere around.

And then it comes and comes out and surfaces and then goes in again and comes out again and comes around so that this is a continuous surface.

One of the radical inventions of modern sculpture was to remove it from the pedestal.

In the case of Asawa, this meant suspending it in space.

They're responsive to light, to motion, to air currents, to the exchange that you have with your body and them.

She says that she can make forms with a line that doesn't steal the air from anyone.

And you have to look closely to really see how they're made.

And then once you do that, you say, oh, my God, what was she thinking?

And she's just this relentless Experimenter.

This is the chart that Addie made for us to figure out the evolution of form of Ruth's sculptures.

She started suspending an inner sphere inside a larger sphere, but the chains would break.

She did these bubbles, spheres that were interlocking.

And here's an hourglass form where she's interlocking these together.

It's interlocking spheres with a half sphere, triple spheres.

And then these open forms she discovered by cutting a sculpture open.

The funny thing about it is her evolution in terms of the loop wire sculptures is from 1950 to 1960, for the most part.

Also the time that she's having our children.

People ask me what it was like growing up.

The imaging photograph where she's weaving the sculpture and we're all there.

One person's drinking a bottle, one person's reading or playing a game.