Ruth Asawa, Untitled, Tied wire sculpture.

Sculptor Ruth Asawa's teachers--among them Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller--taught her, she says, "that there is no separation between studying, performing the daily chores of living, and creating one's own work." She has lived this philosophy in a career that has combined success as an artist, mother of six children, and driving force in the introduction of art programs into the San Francisco schools.

Asawa's accomplishments in all three of these realms are highlighted in the exhibition Ruth Asawa: Completing the Circle. The retrospective survey spans more than 40 years of the work of this nationally recognized San Francisco artist. The title comes from Asawa's commitment to what she calls "completing the circle"--learning something, applying it, and then passing it on in some form so that it is not forgotten.

The core of the exhibition was developed by the Fresno Art Museum as part of their Distinguished Woman Artist Award Series. To this the Oakland Museum curators added works drawn from the artist's studio and Bay Area private and public collections.

The main part of the exhibition includes approximately 75 works featuring sculpture in tied, crocheted and cast metals and cast concrete, as well as drawings, life masks, models of public art and other works. A section of the exhibition documents Asawa's influential work in developing art programs for students in San Francisco public schools. A third component introduces the work of Ruth Asawa's six children and ten grandchildren, members of a family committed to creativity.

Asawa's groundbreaking sculptures, first exhibited in the early 1950s, were described by one critic as reflecting "one of the most original, unprecedented--and unfortunately indescribable--styles of any sculptor in America."

Ruth Asawa, Installation view.

Her early tied wire sculptures were inspired by the hexagonal structures of desert plants. When she found that drawing didn't allow her to capture the plants in the way she wanted, she began constructing "drawings" in three dimensions out of lengths of tied wire. These were followed by pieces in crocheted wire, which she says reflect the hourglass and plant patterns she drew in the dirt as a child with her feet hanging off the horse-drawn farm equipment.

In 1968, appalled by the lack of meaningful arts instruction at the elementary school her children attended, Asawa, together with art historian Sally Woodbridge, created Alvarado Arts Workshop to bring practicing artists into the schools. The program expanded over time to encompass, at its height, 50 San Francisco schools. Asawa's son, ceramist Paul Lanier, is currently artist-in-residence at Alvarado Elementary School where the program originated.

Asawa's public commissions in San Francisco include the beloved Mermaid Fountain at Ghirardelli Square (1968) and the Hyatt Fountain at Union Square (1973). The sculptures grew out of work she was doing in the schools. She took the materials the children were working with--dough, paper, recycled materials--and translated them into sculptures of bronze, cast concrete and stainless steel. Her more recent public commissions include the Japanese American Internment Memorial Sculpture at the San Jose Federal Building of the City of San Jose, California (1994).

Asawa's sculptures are included in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and the Oakland Museum of California, where one of her tied-wire sculptures adorns the entrance. She has received numerous awards, and has served on the San Francisco Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, the John D. Rockfeller Foundation's Council for Museum Education in the Visual Arts and the board of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Asawa was born in 1926, one of seven children, and raised on a truck farm in southern California. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her family was interned, her father sent to a detention center in New Mexico and the rest of the family to a temporary relocation center in Los Angeles. Here Asawa was introduced to art by three internees, artists from Walt Disney Studios who offered art classes to the children in the camp. She attended Milwaukee State Teachers College from 1943 to 1946, but was told that she would never be able to teach art in Wisconsin because of her Japanese ancestry. She then went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, studying art with Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Iliya Bolotowsky in a revolutionary approach to art education. Here she met her husband, architect Albert Lanier. They married in 1949 and moved to San Francisco.

The core exhibition was organized by the Fresno Art Museum, curated by Jacquelin Pilar. The exhibition was expanded for the Oakland Museum of California by Chief Curator of Art Philip Linhares and Curator of Decorative Arts Sue Baizerman, and designed by Kaoru Kitagawa, chief preparator in history. Program and educational components were produced by Art Department Interpretive Specialist Karen Nelson.

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