Ruth Asawa

Art Brokerage: Ruth Asawa American Artist: b. 1926-2013. Ruth 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. From 1946 to 1949, she studied at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers. Asawa learned to use commonplace materials from Albers, and she began experimenting with wire, using a variety of techniques. Like all Black Mountain College students, Asawa took courses across a variety of different art forms, and this interdisciplinary approach helped to shape her artistic practice. She was particularly influenced by the Black Mountain College summer sessions of 1946 and 1948, which featured courses by artist Jacob Lawrence, photography curator and historian Beaumont Newhall, Jean Varda, composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Willem de Kooning, and R. Buckminster Fuller. According to Asawa, the dance courses she took with Merce Cunningham were especially inspirational. In the 1950s, 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. Listings wanted.