Ruth Asawa’s Art of Defiant Hospitality

“It was the first time in my life I didn’t have to do anything,” Asawa later said. She took drawing lessons from three interned Disney animators in an ad-hoc school for the camp’s children. In 1943, she was permitted to leave the camp in Arkansas and enroll at a teachers’ college in Milwaukee, where she hoped to become an art instructor, only to be barred from teaching by xenophobic local schools. A classmate urged her to try Black Mountain College, the Bauhaus-inspired experiment in North Carolina where students farmed, studied, and lived alongside their professors as equals.

Asawa thrived among a now legendary cohort. Her classmates included Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg, and her professors included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Albers—who, along with his wife, Anni, particularly took Asawa under their wing. She absorbed Albers’s lessons in transparency, Fuller’s geodesic logic, and the school’s agrarian ethos, milking cows and churning butter to meet her work-study quota. “We had to scrounge around,” she recalled, of Black Mountain’s perennial poverty. Near the beginning of the retrospective, there’s a painting of bright lozenges she made on the back of an envelope, and a spiral print created out of repeated laundry stamps.

She found a more lasting outlet for her geometric preoccupations during a summer in Mexico, where she learned to “knit” with wire. In the markets of Toluca, venders used the technique to make egg carriers, but Asawa was captivated by the material’s “insect wing” transparency. She started with simple baskets—one became a mail tray for the Alberses—and soon discovered that, by closing the forms, she could nest and layer them in endless permutations.

One of the show’s chief pleasures is witnessing this Cambrian explosion, which played out across the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Early on, there are slumped spheres and dumbbells, golden wire hyperboloids suggestive of crowns. Quickly, she begins stacking the forms vertically, like kelp fronds. Shapes float within shapes with beguiling implausibility: How does a small sphere end up floating in a bowling pin that sits in what looks like a trumpet’s mouth? Asawa worked from the inside out, stopping just short of closing a form’s navel so she could reverse course and spin a second skin around it. She aspired to evoke organic transformations, writing that “a sensation of watching metamorphosis can be achieved through the grouping of related forms at studied distances apart.”

Easy to overlook amid the sculptures hanging throughout the show is a silver band wrapped around a black pebble. It’s Asawa’s wedding ring, designed by Fuller for her marriage to another Black Mountain student, Albert Lanier, in 1949. Over the next nine years—among her most creatively fecund—Asawa gave birth to six children, who played alongside her and even assisted with her work. “My home was and is my studio,” Asawa said of their house, where a family friend, the photographer Imogen Cunningham, often chronicled these intergenerational collaborations.

There was little boundary between friendship, art-making, and everyday life. After someone gave her a plant from Death Valley, Asawa began making “tied wire sculptures,” bundling dozens of strands, then letting them splay into smaller bundles, in an echo of the way that branches divide. Calling to mind tumbleweeds and snowflake-like fractals, they’re more angular and texturally varied than the hanging forms. Asawa even experimented with electroplating, creating effects evocative of gnarled tree bark. Then, in 1985, lupus put a premature end to her experiments with wire. Undeterred, she turned to drawing and watercolors, often depicting plants from her garden. She also kept sculpting in metal, albeit differently, and with the hands of others.

Being led by your materials, Asawa believed, was akin to parenting. “What you do is become background, just like a parent allows a child to express himself,” she said. Sometimes the link was more than analogy. Looking for ways to keep her kids busy, Asawa began mixing flour, salt, and water into baker’s clay, which they molded into little figures and lined up on the family piano. In 1968, she introduced the technique in the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, a program that she co-founded to bring working artists to public classrooms. Its success caught the eye of an architect, who soon asked her to design a fountain for Union Square.

“Andrea,” commissioned by the developer William M. Roth for the renovation of Ghirardelli Square, in San Francisco, 1966–68.Art work by Ruth Asawa / © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Courtesy David Zwirner; Photograph by Aiko Cuneo