Years ago when I was at Flynn, I decided to have my students create figurines for a Day of the Dead altar. For some reason I communicated my need for clay to a Kindergarten colleague and she brought me a bag of clay the following day. At the time I did not know my colleague was the daughter of Ruth Asawa, a foremost local artist and educator.
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“An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”
The life and work of Ruth Asawa is affirming and inspiring, a person connected to family and community, while following her life’s call to create, explore, teach, and share.
She was born in Norwalk, California to humble Japanese immigrant farmers who worked as truck farmers, growing seasonal produce. She and her siblings worked as farmer workers to support their parents during a difficult time of the Great Depression and discrimination against the Japanese. At school, Ruth was recognized for her artistic talent. But on her family’s farm she was often given solitary tasks to complete because she was quick to argue. She doesn’t mind as it allows her to daydream. Ruth recalled, “I used to sit on the back of the horse-drawn leveler with my bare feet drawing forms in the sand, which later in life became the bulk of my sculptures.”
When WWII broke out, she and her family were moved to Santa Anita racetracks and lived in two horse stalls that smelled of horse manure. Among the detainees were Disney artists who taught the internees lessons. While Ruth fathers is sent to New Mexico, the rest of the family is sent to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas where some 8000 Japanese Americans are held. Ruth completes her high school there.
Through a scholarship from the Quakers, she studies to be an art teacher at Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unfortunately in 1946 she couldn't complete her student teaching training due to animosity to the Japanese. Through the encouragement of friends, Ruth travels to Black Mountain College in North Carolina to spend the summer studying art. She is energized by the summer session in Black Mountain College and stays on for another three years on a scholarship. Her teachers include painter Josef Albers, dancer Merce Cunningham, and architect Buckminster Fuller. She is influenced by the community of artists and educators at the experimental, liberal arts school. She meets her future husband, Albert Lanier, while there.
Albert and Ruth marry, against the wishes of their respective families, They decide to live in San Francisco where they believe the vibrant city will be more accepting of an interracial couple. They start a family, eventually having 6 children together. And they eke out a living in their respective fields as architect and artist.
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“You can’t force a plant to bloom. It has a cycle. You have to tend it and care for it and wait for the bloom to happen. If you don’t take care of it, it dies. The more experiences you have like this,the more you begin to understand your own cycle.”
“Together, a work is created that neither artist, child, nor adult can produce alone.”
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“My home was and is my studio.”
It is admirable how Ruth balanced her role as a mother and artist. She would work on her sculptures early in the morning before the children got up and late into the evening after her children had gone to bed. She mentioned how she wanted her children to know what she did and be available to them if they needed her.
“I’ve always had my studio in my house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me–or a peanut butter sandwich.”
Ruth was also connected to a community of artists, who remained life long friends with Ruth. She also collaborated with community members in advocating for arts in public spaces and in public schools. She envisioned a school of the arts that would be located in the civic center of the city, close to the Opera, the Symphony, the Public Library, the Asian Art Museum and the Jazz Center.
Letter “S” from “Christmas”
This bronze cast of a baker’s clay figurine recalls the Christmas ornaments she [Ruth] and her children made, exhibited, and sold around the holidays. Thai sculpture was Asawa’s first test casting baker’s clay in bronze. As she explained, “Friends said to me ‘This is child’s play. You should do serious, permanent things.’ So I began making bronzes by means of dough models instead of traditional clay.”
“Art teaches discipline, craft, respect for tools and for sharing, and finally self-respect.”
In 1985, Ruth was diagnosed with lupus which significantly reduced her physical capacity but not her creative spirit. She made was she could including numerous drawings and watercolors. She stated, “As a result of this experience, I realized that my interest in watercolors and drawings was by no means satisfied.” She turned her creative energies to a series of paintings of the plants and flowers that grew in her and her husband’s garden. Throughout the 1990s, she concentrated on making drawings of flowers many of them based on the bouquets given to her my family and friends, becoming a record of the company she kept via the inscriptions she often added, like Albert’s Rose Bouquet or Valentine bouquet from Adam, her son who tended the garden in their later years.
Addie, Asawa’s daughter, has mused that the artists practice of drawing a bouquet and then regifting the arrangement as a work of art enable her to fully absorb the affection of friends and family and present flowers to her. Here a card tucket among the stems toward the top of this bouquet reads “congratulations + love from Anni.”
