Ruth Asawa
Dicecream MagazineRuth Aiko Asawa (January 24, 1926 – August 5, 2013) was an American sculptor. She was known in San Francisco as the "Fountain Lady". Asawa has work that is included in the art collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
She was a 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 in tribute to her.
Asawa experimented with crocheted wire sculptures of abstract forms that appear as three-dimensional line drawings. She learned the basic technique while in Toluca, Mexico, where villagers used a similar technique to make baskets from galvanized wire.
Asawa experimented with crocheted wire sculptures of abstract forms that appear as three-dimensional line drawings. She learned the basic technique while in Toluca, Mexico, where villagers used a similar technique to make baskets from galvanized wire.
In 1968, Asawa created her first representational work, a mermaid fountain in Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront, in which she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city of San Francisco in dough, which were then cast in iron. Over the years, she went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the "fountain lady". Despite her tremendous success, Ruth Asawa is little-known by the people of Japan.
She began experimenting with tied wire sculptures of images rooted in nature that became increasingly geometric and abstract as she continued to work in that form.
"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. "This aspect of her work anticipates much of the installation work that has come to dominate contemporary art."
Current exhibitions:
Ruth Asawa: Permanent Installation
October 17, 2005 - October 17, 2020
de Young Museum,
San Francisco
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Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985
August 17, 2017 - April 1, 2018
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Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West
September 7, 2017 - January 21, 2018
