In Minds of: Ruth Asawa

JONATHAN LAIB: Hello Henry. As always, it is great to chat! 

HENRY WEVERKA: Always good to speak with you, Jonathan!

JL: As president of Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., you are the primary protector and steward of Ruth Asawa’s legacy. You have worked in an official capacity with the artist’s estate for six years. I have had the unique pleasure of working with you and your incredible family since 2008, and it continues to be a phenomenal journey. Thank you for taking the time today to share some thoughts on your grandmother’s work.

HW: While I’m the point person here at our family office, I’m incredibly grateful to my large family—specifically my mother, aunt, and uncles—who continue to provide their support and expertise. Their deep knowledge of Asawa’s artistic practice, community, and life story having grown up with and around her, has been invaluable to her success since she passed away in 2013.

My grandmother has been well-known here in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1950s but remained relatively unknown in New York until shortly before she passed away. Our family can’t thank you enough for all of the hard work you’ve done to champion her legacy over the years! From her first solo presentation in New York in more than fifty years that you organized at Christie’s back in 2013 to last year’s drawing exhibition “Ruth Asawa: Through Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Menil Drawing Institute, it’s been quite a ride.

JL: Thank you, Henry. I have been quite fortunate to have this opportunity to work so closely with you and your family; it is a blessing. As Asawa’s grandson, you have a unique relationship and perspective when it comes to her work. What overlooked aspect of her life or work do you most look forward to sharing with the world?

HW: My grandmother is best known for her looped- and tied-wire sculptures, and for good reason. They are totally original, inspired by basket-weaving techniques she encountered while visiting Mexico in 1947. That said, I get the most joy from sharing other aspects of her diverse practice—her paintings, drawings, prints, casts, and public commissions, along with stories of her tremendous contributions to the arts and arts education here in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

In 2020, we worked with Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, to place one of my favorite Asawa creations– a collection of 233 bisque-fired life-cast masks of family and friends that hung on the exterior of her San Francisco home. The mask installation, along with the fifteen wire sculptures Asawa donated to the de Young in 2005, can be viewed by the public at no charge, something I know my grandmother would’ve wanted.

Looking forward, there are so many connections between her drawings and tied-wire sculptures or paintings and looped-wire sculptures that have yet to be explored. To describe my grandmother simply as a “sculptor” is, I believe, a great disservice to who she was as an artist who experimented with so many different mediums and materials over the course of almost sixty years. 

Our family is grateful to you, David Zwirner, and the many museums, curators, writers, and scholars who have helped our family tell Asawa’s story and share her complete body of work with new audiences. 

We look forward to Asawa’s first exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong (and Asawa’s first solo exhibition in Asia) in November, which will feature many never-before-seen wire sculptures, watercolors, floral drawings and prints made at the Tamarind Workshop, and are always happy to support projects that present Asawa’s work through new lenses.

JL: I love that you mention Asawa’s brief but instrumental 1947 trip to Mexico. Curator Zoe Ryan included Asawa in her 2019 exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, “In a Cloud, In a Wall, In a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury,” which addressed Mexico’s unique role in twentieth-century modernism. Asawa’s working methods were informed not only by her visits to Mexico but through so many different experiences, people, and ideas–it really is tremendously fascinating to me that she was able to synthesize so much into work that is so refined and so graceful. In recent years, have you learned anything new about your grandmother, or have any of your previous thoughts or assumptions about her been transformed in any significant way?

HW: My grandmother passed away when I was 24 years old, so I had the tremendous privilege of spending quite a bit of time with her and my grandfather, architect Albert Lanier. I grew up around the corner from them, so I could walk through my parents’ backyard and into theirs, and there was always something going on. That said, I didn’t truly understand the gravity of who she was as an artist and community leader until I began working alongside my aunt Aiko and my mother, Addie, at our family office in 2018. The dozens of long, looped-wire sculptures that hung above our heads in the living room up until the early 2000s (all of which have since found new homes in museums and private collections across the country) were somewhat of an afterthought. There was so much going on in my grandmother’s house—a rotating door of artist friends and fellow arts advocates, family, amazing food, never-ending artmaking—that I don’t recall spending too much time bothering to look up to the ceiling.

Now, in my role as president of Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., I continue to learn more about her practice, arts advocacy, and influence on others every day. So many people I’ve met have a unique story of the first time they encountered her work or a chance meeting with her that positively impacted their lives, regardless of whether they remain involved in the arts or not. I think it’s important to note that Asawa’s legacy isn’t just hanging from the ceiling and on the walls of major museums and galleries like David Zwirner; it can also be found in the San Francisco public schools and in the hearts and minds of so many people she encountered throughout her life, especially children. 

JL: Asawa was a person of the people. She fostered a sense of community wherever she found herself, and it seems to me that her biggest contribution in this way was later in life through her teaching and advocacy for arts. This advocacy advanced arts education in San Francisco, but her voice was also important nationally–she was a member of the National Endowment for the Arts Task Force and President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health. Your grandmother grew up on a farm outside of L.A., one of seven siblings in a large family that lived communally, and everyone had to pitch in to help with what needed to be done. When you learn that she was interned during World War II alongside her family and that she attended Black Mountain College, which involved and promoted the ideals of communal living, it becomes apparent just how much of her life was spent living closely with others. She was not the stereotypical brooding artist working silently in her studio. Asawa had six children of her own, and much of her life was spent surrounded by others; she obviously preferred this way of living and working. Do you feel these early experiences fed into her future life as an artist and a mother?

HW: I think her upbringing had a tremendous impact on both her artistic practice and family life after moving to San Francisco. Born in 1926, my grandmother was the fourth of seven children. Her parents, Umakichi and Haru Asawa were Japanese immigrant truck farmers who expected their children to help on the farm and around the house before and after school six days a week. As you can imagine, during that time, there was very little time for her and her siblings to pursue extracurricular activities. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the subsequent issuance of Executive Order 9066 ordering the removal of all Japanese and Japanese American people living on the West Coast, she, her parents, and five of her six siblings (her younger sister Kimiko was stranded visiting Japan when the war started) were sent to incarceration camps. 

Umakichi was separated from the family first in February 1942 and sent to Lordsburg, New Mexico; the rest of the family was incarcerated at the Santa Anita Assembly Center for five months beginning in April and then transferred to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. Despite these horrible circumstances, she was lucky enough to be incarcerated alongside three Disney animators at Santa Anita who volunteered to teach arts classes—her first exposure to professional artists. At Rohwer, she had a white teacher named Mabel Rose Jamison who took her and other teenagers out of the camp to draw and paint. There are two surviving watercolors from my grandmother’s time at Rohwer, both of which were saved and returned to her by Jamison.

Reflecting on her incarceration experience years later, she said, “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.” 

In September 1943, she was allowed to leave Rohwer to attend college and chose to pursue a degree in arts education at Milwaukee State Teachers College. After three years of study, she was unable to complete her degree due to lingering anti-Japanese sentiment after the war. Two of her friends and fellow students in Milwaukee, Elaine Schmidt, and Ray Johnson, recommended that she go to an experimental liberal arts school in North Carolina to study with Josef Albers. It was there at Black Mountain where she found a community of brilliant professional working artists and teachers, including Albers and his wife Anni, R. Buckminster Fuller, mathematician Max Dehn, Merce Cunningham, and others, and where she met my grandfather Albert Lanier. The three years she spent at Black Mountain, from 1946 to 1949, and specifically her studies with Josef Albers, were transformative and had a lasting impact on her artistic practice, her interest in exploring materials and creative problem solving, and her commitment to arts education. She would remain friends with the Alberses and Buckminster Fuller for the rest of their lives.

My grandparents were engaged while students at Black Mountain College and, after a year apart on separate coasts, were married in San Francisco in 1949. My grandmother always knew she wanted to have a large family, so within ten years of marriage, they welcomed six children—Xavier (1950), Aiko (1950), Hudson (1952), Adam (1956), Addie Laurie (1958) and Paul (1959)—in what was one of the most prolific decades of her career in terms of her artistic output. Just like her parents, my grandmother and grandfather expected their children to learn the value of hard work while encouraging them to participate in art-making from an early age. In 1961, my grandmother, together with Xavier, Aiko, and Hudson, used blowtorches, chisels, and wire brushes to carve a meander pattern she’d first explored at Black Mountain College into redwood slabs that would serve as the front doors to the family home.

To this day, most of my family members remain involved in the arts as visual artists, woodworkers, ceramicists, photographers, and dancers. In a 2001 artist statement for her exhibition “Completing the Circle” at the Fresno Art Museum, in which she included artwork by her children, their spouses, and her grandchildren, she said, “As a mother and grandmother, I expected my six children and ten grandchildren to participate in the making of art as well as washing the dishes, taking the garbage out, weeding the garden, and building things. They have helped me on commissions and continue today to work with me on projects. Although most of them do not earn their living as artists, their lives have been made far richer because of this involvement. I believe in the lasting joy that making art can bring to all of us.” 

As their family grew throughout the 1950s, so too did my grandparents’ community of artist friends in the Bay Area. Among them were photographer Imogen Cunningham, jewelers Merry Renk and Margaret De Patta, painter Peggy Tolk-Watkins, master potter and teacher Marguerite Wildenhain, and others.

Then, in 1968, Asawa and a group of neighborhood mothers–including architectural historian Sally Woodbridge and Andrea Jepson, who would later model for Asawa’s Andrea mermaid fountain in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square–founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop. What began as a summer session at a single elementary school grew to become a citywide program, paying professional artists to teach at 50 San Francisco public schools using mostly recycled materials. My grandmother would continue to advocate for arts education for the rest of her life, and the public arts high school she helped found in 1982 was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010. 

From the mid-1960s to 2002, my grandmother also enlisted the help of her community, including family, friends, neighbors, schoolchildren, foundrymen, gardeners, landscape architects and local business leaders, to create numerous public commissions around the San Francisco Bay Area. Later in life, she was commissioned to create the Japanese American Internment Memorial (1990–1994) outside the Federal Building in San Jose, California, and Garden of Remembrance (2000–2002) at San Francisco State University, both of which address the Japanese incarceration during World War II.