Ruth Asawa

Ruth Aiko Asawa (Japanese: 浅和 愛子, Hepburn: Asawa Aiko; January 24, 1926 – August 5, 2013) was an American modernist artist known for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of figurative and abstract drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.

Born in 1926 in Norwalk, California to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa was the fourth of seven children and grew up on a truck farm. In 1942, her family was was sent to different Japanese internment camps as a result of U.S. isolation policies during World War II. At the Rohwer War Relocation Center, Asawa learned to draw from illustrators interned there. In 1943, she left the camp to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College. Hoping to become a teacher, Asawa was ultimately unable to, as her Japanese ancestry prevented her from obtaining a teaching position in Wisconsin.

In 1946, Asawa joined the avant-garde artistic community at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied under the influential German-American Bauhaus painter and color theorist Josef Albers, as well as the American architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. At Black Mountain College, Asawa began making looped-wire sculptures inspired by a the basket crocheting technique she learned in 1947 on a trip to Mexico. In 1955, she held her first exhibition in New York. By the early 1960s, Asawa had achieved commercial and critical success and became an advocate for public art, saying, "art for everyone." Asawa was the driving force behind the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.

Her work is featured in collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Fifteen of Asawa's wire sculptures are on permanent display in the tower of San Francisco's de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, and several of her fountains are located in public places in San Francisco. In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service honored her work by producing a series of ten stamps that commemorate her well-known wire sculptures.