Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa, known in San Francisco as “the fountain lady,” was born to nomadic Japanese immigrants in Southern California. Her interest in art was deep-seeded, grounded by her participation in Japanese Cultural School every Saturday where she learned origami and Japanese calligraphy. At the age of 16, Asawa and her family were sent to a Japanese internment camp for 18 months. Asawa drew daily, participating in renegade art classes taught by persecuted animators from Walt Disney Studios. After pursuing higher education she studied with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, advocates for interdisciplinary art, repurposing materials, and discovering new uses for commonplace media. The crotchet and basket-weaving techniques that would appear in her earliest sculptures were absorbed from locals during a trip to Mexico in 1947. This craftsmanship set her art career in motion almost immediately. 

Aswan moved to San Francisco in 1949, and began creating her looped wire sculptures. Made of iron, copper, or brass, her work from this period garnered international renown and earned her entry into the 1955 Sao Paolo Biennial as the representative for the United States. These forms also had the unique advantage of being portable and were often created at home while Asawa cared for her children. These delicate sculptures generated a graceful synergy, their slender lines rendered prominent forms that were simultaneously transparent and densely packed with considerations of the female form, the contradictions between a micro and macro viewing experience, and the transformation of materials. The hypnotic, biomorphic pods garnered dynamic interactions with their surroundings. Asawa transitioned to grander tiered wire objects in the early 1960s, then began to seek out commissions for public projects. Her first award was for Ghirardelli Square’s Andrea mermaid fountain in 1966. Famously a community advocate invested in adolescent arts education, the San Francisco School of the Arts, a public arts high school, was named after Asawa in 2010. February 12 is also officially Ruth Asawa Day as of 1982.

Ruth Asawa has been featured in major exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Japan Society in New York, and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles among others.