Women in Art: Quiet Obliteration · Chapter 05 · Let air through
Ruth Asawa
Asawa learned her technique from basket makers in a Mexican village, and used it to make enclosures you can see straight through.
4 min read
In 1947 Ruth Asawa went to Toluca, in Mexico, and watched people make egg baskets out of wire. The technique is a single continuous loop, worked like crochet without a hook: each loop hangs off the one before it, and the shape emerges from tension rather than from a frame. She came back with it and spent the next sixty years finding out what else it could hold.
The hanging sculptures have no armature and no joins. One wire goes in at the top and comes out at the bottom, and between those two points it makes a lobed body, and often another body inside that one, and sometimes a third — nested forms that are continuous with their own container. There is no inside surface and no outside surface. There is one surface, folded.
Asawa studied at Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1949, under Josef Albers. She had gone there because a teaching degree had become impossible for her: she had completed the coursework in Milwaukee, but in the years right after the war no school would place a Japanese American student teacher. She had already spent part of the war incarcerated with her family — first at Santa Anita, then at Rohwer in Arkansas.
Black Mountain was not a rescue. It was an odd, underfunded, argumentative place where painters taught alongside dancers and poets and nobody was quite in their assigned lane. That is exactly why a wire-basket technique picked up in a Mexican village could arrive in the middle of an art education and be taken seriously as sculpture rather than filed under craft.
There is no inside surface and no outside surface. There is one surface, folded.
It matters for this issue that Asawa's enclosures are transparent. Bourgeois builds a room you cannot enter and cannot fully see. Asawa builds a boundary that is entirely holes — the wire is barely there, and the form is unmistakable anyway. Enclosure without concealment. The same gesture makes the wall and the window.
Find where the wire enters. Then follow the loops down to the waist of the form, where they have to get smaller and tighter, and see whether you can find the place where an inner body begins. It is one line the whole way. Losing your place in it is part of the experience.
Asawa is the hinge of the issue and the reason the site has this name. She is the enclosure chapter that refuses to be claustrophobic, and she is the direct link to Black Mountain College — a school full of people learning outside their assigned discipline, which is what this whole publication is trying to be.
