Licensing

Types of Wire

Narrator: Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art, Japanese American National Museum

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.