Ruth Asawa: The Uses of Adversity

Ruth Asawa, Untitled, 1954, Enameled copper and iron wire

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . . .   (William Shakespeare, As You Like It)
​​

We are living in a time of adversity, complete with its own ugly, venomous toads at the helm, and would do well to remember lessons of the past. I find inspiration in the life and career of the sculptor Ruth Asawa, currently having a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (the exhibition travels to New York’s MoMA in the Fall).

Although Asawa’s remarkable sculptures need no backstory to explain their power, her life as an Asian woman artist contains multiple examples of overcoming real obstacles and discrimination embedded in the law.

Born in California into a family of Japanese immigrants, Asawa was 16 when they were sent to a Japanese internment camp. Despite this wartime oppression, she learned how to draw from artists and illustrators also interned at the camp. She originally wanted to be a teacher, but again her Japanese ancestry denied her a teaching position during the war, so she decided to concentrate on art. Later, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she studied with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. She began to create the suspended, looped and tied wire sculptures for which she would become famous.

When Asawa married the architect Albert Lanier, interracial marriages were illegal in all but two states, so the couple moved to San Francisco, where she found her place in the art community. Defying all stereotypes about what was possible for a woman artist, she and Lanier had six children. 

Every time Asawa encountered an obstacle, she managed to move through it, and found a precious jewel of possibility.