Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa arrived at Black Mountain College (BMC) in 1946 at the encouragement of her good friends and fellow students at Milwaukee State Teachers College, Elaine Schmitt and Ray Johnson. After spending sixteen months in Japanese American internment camps in California and Arkansas and then being denied her teaching degree from Milwaukee, Asawa sought formal artistic training. She was fascinated by the economy of the line in artmaking and pursued its material possibilities in Josef Albers’s classes and through her own experimentation with drawing, paper folding, and wire sculpture. Asawa was particularly inspired by Albers’s attention to the interplay between positive and negative space.

Asawa also studied with Ilya Bolotowsky, Buckminster Fuller, took dance classes with Merce Cunningham, and was especially influenced by her studies with the mathematician Max Dehn. In 1947, Asawa went to teach art in the small town of Toluca, Mexico. While there, she met Josef and Anni Albers in Mexico City, where she delighted in the mural arts of Diego Rivera, and visited the Casa Azul. The trip proved enormously influential on her art-making practice. Back in Toluca, she observed basket making techniques that involved looping wire without the use of needles. Later, she would incorporate this technique into her sculptural practice, producing the abstract suspensions for which she is best known.

Back at BMC, Asawa met her future husband and fellow student, Albert Lanier. The two were engaged at Black Mountain and eventually moved to the San Francisco, where they lived and worked for the rest of their lives. Asawa’s artworks are held in the collections of major museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, among others.

[Source: Corey Loftus - Biography edited and approved by Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.]