Art and the Complexity of Ethnic Identity (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #11: Importance to Japanese American community)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #11: Importance to Japanese American community

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art at the Japanese American National Museum, in March 2007.

Transcription
In many ways, Ruth Asawa is a typical Japanese American Nisei, the child of immigrants who came to the United States to carve out a better life for themselves and their children. But her life and art are most significant because they remind us how complex ethnic identity can be. During World War II, like all Japanese Americans on the west coast, Ruth was incarcerated with her mother and siblings. Her father was subject to a segregated Justice Department prison camp. It would be years before they were reunited. His crime, he was a community leader. Yet, the experience of the World War II incarceration ironically made it possible for Ruth to meet Japanese American artists, to attend college on a scholarship, and ultimately led her to become an artist. So, while Ruth’s Japanese American heritage foreclosed some opportunities - for instance she couldn’t become a high school art teacher as she intended - it also created others. At every step in her life, Ruth Asawa defied convention and stereotype, including marrying Albert Lanier, a man of European American heritage, despite the fact that both their parents had strong misgivings. In the process, Ruth Asawa became a role model of a woman, mother and Japanese American, who was also an artist, teacher and civic leader.

Plating (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #10: Electro-Plated Sculptures)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #10: Electro-Plated Sculptures

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa's daughter in March 2007.

Transcription
Ruth would take her sculptures to be cleaned, or have them dipped in these tanks to change the color of the wire, to plate them… it was called a plating company. There were also these electro-plating tanks there, and she saw one of the men taking a big car bumper out of one of these electro-plating tanks. She said, “What are you doing there?” And the man said, “We’re putting the car bumper into the electro-plating tank, and what it does is it coats. It plates the bumper and makes it smooth. It takes the bumps away and it smoothes it out.” She said, “What would happen if you reversed the current of the electricity? Could you make my tied wire sculpture grow the ends of the wire?” And, they tried it, and it worked. So, that’s how she started doing electro-plated sculptures. Unfortunately, the electro-plated sculptures were very brittle, so she didn’t make that many of them, because they were way too fragile to travel or to handle.

Lithography (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #9: Tamarind Lithography workshop)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #9: Tamarind Lithography workshop

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Daniell Cornell, Curator and Director of Contemporary Arts Projects at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, in March 2007.

Transcription
In 1965, through the support and recommendation of Joseph Albers, Ruth was able to attend the Tamarind Lithography workshop through a fellowship that she attained as the artist in residency there. The workshop usually employed seven printers at a time, who artists then produced work that the printers could experiment with. This was a situation, of course, that Ruth was totally at home with a loved, the notion of experimentation, because her whole life had been about working with materials and experimenting with how they might be transformed, especially if they moved from one medium to another. And, so here was a chance for her to work with lithography. She said that lithography is most like drawing, because you actually do draw on stone plates. Often times today, lithographers use metal plates, but the Tamarind workshop uses the more traditional stone plates, in which an image is drawn on the plate, and then manipulated, and then put through a press. This interesting experimentation and transformation, and the collaborative nature of this project really appealed to every sensibility of Ruth’s. She ended up creating these images, which primarily experiment with the notion of reversal; reversing the image, reversing black and white as tonalities in the images, experimenting with the notion of foreground and background and reversing the sense of the viewer of gestalt in that relationship.

Black Mountain College (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #8: Black Mountain College)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #8: Black Mountain College

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Daniell Cornell, Curator and Director of Contemporary Arts Projects at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, in March 2007.

Transcription
At the end of her third year at Milwaukee State Teacher’s college in 1946, Ruth found that she was unable to complete her degree, because anti-Japanese sentiment was still so strong from the war that it was impossible for her to find a place that would accept her as a candidate for student teaching. And so, she decided to join her friends, Elaine Smith and Ray Johnson, fellow artists, to attend the summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. This was a school that had been set up according to the progressive educational principles of John Dewey. And, Joseph and Annie Albers had come from the Bauhaus in Germany, where they had had to flee Nazi anti-Semitic sentiment during the war, and they had come to Black Mountain to establish the principles of organic design and art that underlined the teachings of the Bauhaus. And, Ruth was so taken by the principles that she found there that she translated them into her own aesthetic as she worked out these ideas in two-dimensional form.

Imogen and Ruth (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #7: Friendship with Imogen Cunningham)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #7: Friendship with Imogen Cunningham

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa's daughter, in March 2007.

Transcription
Imogen Cunningham and Ruth Asawa had a friendship that lasted many years. Ruth drew Imogen, Imogen photographed Ruth over the years, and photographed Ruth’s family. In trade for sculpture and photography, they were two women who decided they were going to have children and be artists, and make both of those work together.

Achieving Transparencies (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #6: Types of wire)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #6: Types of wire

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa's daughter, in March 2007.

Transcription
Ruth used a variety of wires, including iron, brass, copper, bronze, stainless steel, galvanized steel, aluminum, monel and even gold-filled wire. Each wire had its different physical and visual properties. She used iron for her earlier sculptures, then tried copper and brass. She preferred copper because it’s more malleable and less corrosive. She often used two or more kinds of wire in making her long, interlocking sculptures. By using wires of different colors, she was able to achieve the transparencies that she liked so much.

Types of Wire (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #5: Using different types of wire)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #5: Using different types of wire

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art at the Japanese American National Museum, in March 2007.

Transcription
Ruth Asawa used different types of wire in her sculpture, in part because each metal had a slightly different characteristic that she could exploit in creating the sculpture. They also had different color, and you can see in the gallery here how she’s able to contrast the slight variations of the wire in the sculptures to create a sort of dynamic sculpture in space.

Another thing to remember is that this wasn’t the kind of wire that you could buy at the hobby store, but rather wire for industrial purposes, either for businesses or contractors. So she would buy these gigantic spools of wire in part because she never really knew when was going to make them, how big or small the final product would be, and it was really important for her to have a single strand of wire.

Tied Wire Sculptures (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #4: Tied wire sculptures)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #4: Tied wire sculptures

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa's daughter, in March 2007.

Transcription
The tied wire sculptures are called tied wire because they’re tied in bunches with a smaller piece of wire. The bunches are divided, and then these newly created smaller bunches are tied, and then divided again. So, it’s a series of tying and dividing, tying and dividing, tying and dividing. Later on, Ruth’s tied wire sculptures became more geometrical. Instead of using only wire ties, she had to use sauder to keep the wires from shifting. The tied wire sculptures are made with open centers, or tightly bunched, closed centers. Some are mounted on wood bases, some are suspended from the ceiling, and others are mounted on the wall.

Drawing vs. Wire Art (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #3: Looped wire sculptures)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #3: Looped wire sculptures

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art at the Japanese American National Museum, and Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa's daughter, in March 2007.

Transcription
The immediacy of drawing was central to Ruth Asawa’s practice as an artist, for her wire was like a line, and wire sculptures functioned as three-dimensional drawings in space. As such, her calloused and often bloody fingers, wrapped in tape to protect them, were her tools. Aiko Cuneo, Ruth’s daughter, talks more about how she created these sculptures.

The looped wire sculptures are formed by hand using only wire, a wooden dowel, and Ruth’s hands. She did all the looping and shaping herself, and the sculptures take shape as each new row of loops is added, much like knitting or crocheting. Sometimes she worked from the bottom, upwards, and other times she started at the top, and worked her way down.

Ruth Asawa - At a Glance (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #2: Ruth Asawa history)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #2: Ruth Asawa history

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art at the Japanese American National Museum, in March 2007.

Transcription
So, I wanted to tell you a little bit about Ruth Asawa. She was born to Japanese immigrants on a farm in Norwalk here in Southern California. And, she is one of the country’s pioneering modernist sculptors, somebody who invented a radical and innovative sculptural language of abstract wire forms.

Ruth Asawa is considered an artistic treasure in the San Francisco Bay area, but in many sectors of the current world of art, she is being held as a new discovery, somebody to watch. However, Ruth has had a long career and lots of prior recognition. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, her wire sculptures were regularly shown throughout the country. She was the recipient of prestigious art prizes and awards, including prominent commissions and selection as a United States representative to the 1955 Sao Paulo Bienal.

In 1956, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired a looped wire piece for its permanent collection. In 1960, the de Young Museum held a solo exhibition of her work, followed in the 1970’s by a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which is now known as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Welcome to "The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air" (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #1: Welcome message)

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air - Audio Tour Clip #1: Welcome message

This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This introduction was narrated by Sabrina Motley of the Japanese American National Museum in March 2007.

Transcription
Welcome to The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, originally organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, now on display at the Japanese American National Museum. This exhibition represents the first complete retrospective to showcase Ruth Asawa’s career, as one of America’s most important women artists of the century. Asawa produced works that celebrate the richness and beauty of everyday life through the use of intricate and graceful forms.