Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa was born in Norwalk, California, in 1926 and raised on a farm. In 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were separated and unjustly displaced to incarceration camps, along with over 100,000 other people of Japanese descent, in the wake of Executive Order 9066. After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. In that environment Asawa flourished, creating drawings with undulating lines, repeating patterns and studies of positive and negative space that would resonate in later work.

In 1949, Asawa moved from North Carolina to San Francisco—the city she would call home for the rest of her life—and exhibited at SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) for the first time. This period included the development of the artist’s signature innovation: hanging looped-wire sculptures with forms within forms and interlocking lobes.