Ruth Aiko Asawa (January 24, 1926 – August 5, 2013) was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms.

In 1942, her family was separated when they were sent to different Japanese internment camps as a result of isolation policies for Japanese-Americans mandated by the U.S. government during World War II.

[1] 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 basket crocheting technique she learned in 1947 during a trip to Mexico.

Postal Service honored her work by producing a series of ten stamps that commemorate her well-known wire sculptures.

[7][8][9] Her parents, immigrants from Japan, operated a truck farm until the Japanese American internment during World War II.

[11] Ruth's father, Umakichi Asawa, was arrested by FBI agents in February 1942 and interned at a detention camp in New Mexico.

This led to a direct sense of social consciousness in Asawa's sculptures and an intimacy influenced by the adversity her family experienced as a minority in America.

Asawa attended an art class at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; among her teachers was Clara Porset, an interior designer from Cuba.

[16] A friend of artist Josef Albers, Porset told Asawa about Black Mountain College where he was teaching.

This was a godsend, because it encouraged me to follow my interest in art, and I subsequently enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

[19] Like all Black Mountain College students, Asawa took courses across a variety of different art forms and this interdisciplinary approach helped to shape her artistic practice.

[20] She was particularly influenced by the summer sessions of 1946 and 1948, which featured courses by artist Jacob Lawrence, photography curator and historian Beaumont Newhall, Jean Varda, composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Willem de Kooning, sculptor Leo Amino, and R. Buckminster Fuller.

[21] In one class that included fellow student Rauschenberg Asawa reported that they ran down a large hill like it was a dance with flaming torches blasting Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

[15] In the 1950s, while a student at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, Asawa made a series of crocheted wire sculptures in various abstract forms.

Asawa felt that she and her fellow students were ahead of the administration with developing their own form of modernism in sculpture, constantly trying new things.

[20] Her looped-wire sculptures explore the relationship of interior and exterior volumes, creating, as she put it, "a shape that was inside and outside at the same time.

As a poor college student Asawa embraced inexpensive found objects such as rocks, leaves and sticks because they neither had the funds or access to good paper.

[28] "Ruth was ahead of her time in understanding how sculptures could function to define and interpret space," said Daniell Cornell, curator of the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Collaborating with the seven printmakers at the workshop, she produced fifty-two lithographs of friends, family (including her parents, Umakichi and Haru), natural objects, and plants.

[30] In the 1960s, Asawa began receiving commissions for large-scale sculptures in public and commercial spaces in San Francisco and other cities.

[32] The sculpture depicts two cast bronze mermaids in a fountain, one nursing a merbaby, splashing among sea turtles and frogs.

[9] Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architect credited with designing the waterfront space, described the sculpture as a suburban lawn ornament and demanded the artwork's removal.

[38] Co-organized by both institutions in close collaboration with the estate of the artist, this note-worthy show highlighted the breadth of Asawa's works on paper, including drawings, collages, watercolors, and sketchbooks that she produced as part of her daily sketching routine, establishing drawing as a continuous strand throughout the artist's career and crucial to developing her distinct, inventive aesthetic sensibilities.