Ruth Asawa documentary on an artist who worked every minute HOW TO SEE

Ruth Asawa is an artist whose generosity of spirit really comes through in her work. She offers a kind of model for how to see the world. Asawa herself said that everything is connected, continuous. If you zoom out and you look at Asawa's nearly six-decade career, you find the sense of boundarylessness between art and life. Really everything and anything was on the table for art. My parents moved here when I was one in 1960, so I know where all the light switches are. She did a lot of her work right here. Her long loop wire pieces hung right from that beam and it was convenient because if she had five or ten minutes, she could also watch what's cooking at the same time as she was working on her sculptures. Life here in this house was a continuum. She was always moving. You see her running to the back of the truck, throwing in the milk carton structure, and then driving up off the hill. That really explains her. I've never met anyone who worked harder than her in my life. I've always been interested in the narrative, in the story of her life. She was born to Japanese immigrant parents. They were truck farmers. So wake up, have breakfast, go work in the fields, come back in, change your clothes, go to school, come back home, change your clothes again, go back into the fields, work until dark. The great benefit of that is that she really lived in nature and she understood cycles of nature. Sunrise, planting, growth, harvest, decay, composting, and then sunset. And then it would start all over again. And that kind of went on until she was 15 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And in two months, her father was taken by the FBI. And then in two months more, her mother and the rest of her siblings, they were incarcerated. I was interned at Santa Anita racetracks. There were no schools and so everybody rallied, all of the college students and professional people. Also interned were the Disney animators. And so she got to draw with practicing artists for the first time. And she didn't have to work on the farm. This is my first experience with it in a serious way of how an artist works. So in 1946, Ruth Asawa arrived at Black Mountain College, which was a multidisciplinary experimental college in North Carolina. It was really at Black Mountain that she felt she first learned how to see. You worked in your jeans during the day and worked on the farm and you went to your class and you studied and you talked and you argued with your teachers. And then at night, the teachers and the students performed together. And they ate together. The faculty that summer was Joseph Albers. Eventually, Merce Cunningham comes, Buckminster Fuller comes, and so her whole life is transformed. Black Mountain really influenced my whole approach. When Albers gave a class, say in paper, you weren't talking about going from paper, which is not very important, and going to next you go into glass and then next you go to wood. And then finally you graduate to plastics because that's sort of the modern material. But we always went from paper to paper to paper to paper. To make paper do what it hasn't done yet, what he was talking about was abstracting from the material. Rather than being concerned with your own design ideas and forcing something into it, what you do is you become background, just like a parent allows the child to express himself and the parent becomes sort of supportive. During this time at Black Mountain, Asawa really begins to explore the potential of these everyday materials, gathering leaves and turning them into compositions. She uses a laundry stamp from the school's laundry room inscribed with the school's initials BMC. While a student at Black Mountain, Asawa spent one summer teaching in Toluca, Mexico. She happened upon a wire basket in a crafts market. She asked a local craftsperson to teach her the technique, which she then adapted. She also really understood baling wire and chicken wire and galvanized wire because she was a farm worker. She was tying things up to fence. She was repairing crates. Wire is like the most logical thing for her to become fascinated with. Asawa's most consequential contribution to the history of art in the 20th century is a formal innovation that she makes around 1951, which she calls the continuous form within a form, a surface that develops from the bottom up. I always begin from the inside and then go on up. Then doubles back on itself. This is the outside surface in here and then it becomes the inside surface of the next form. To form another sphere around the first one. The center one is in here and then it comes and comes out and surfaces and then goes in again and comes out again and comes around. So this is a continuous surface. One of the radical inventions of modern sculpture was to remove it from the pedestal. In the case of Asawa, this meant suspending it in space. They're responsive to light, to motion, to air currents, to the exchange that you have with your body and them. She says that she can make forms with a line that doesn't steal the air from anyone. She made every single loop and you have to look closely to really see how they're made. And then once you do that, you say, oh my god, what was she thinking? And she's just this relentless experimenter. This is the chart that Addie made for us to figure out the evolution of form of Ruth's sculptures. She started suspending them with chain. She started suspending an inner sphere inside a larger sphere. But the chains would break, so then she started interlocking them. She went to the trumpets. She did these bubbles, spheres that were interlocking. And here's an hourglass form where she's interlocking these together. This one is very, very tricky to do. It's interlocking spheres with a half sphere, triple spheres. And then these open forms she discovered by cutting a sculpture open. They look like a clamshell opening. She calls these her open window forms. The funny thing about it is her evolution in terms of the loop wire sculptures is from 1950 to 1960 for the most part. Also the time that she's having her children. 1950, no kids. 1959, she has six. People ask me what it was like growing up. That was our world. We were our world. The imaging photograph where she's weaving the sculpture and we're all there. One person's drinking a bottle. One person's reading or playing a game. We were there. I was there. I have no idea how she did it, but it happened. Yeah, I mean, come on. Six kids, zero help, no cook. And she did all that work and her work. She was an insomniac. She needed very little sleep. If she had 48 hours in a day, she'd use 44 of them and then sleep for four. You know, so she just like never wasted a minute. She would sketch at meetings. Well, we were so used to her drawing us from a very early age. We've got baby pictures of us all the way growing up. And, you know, sometimes our drawings are right next to it. She let us draw on her sketchbook sometimes. I heard her say that all children are natural artists. And as they get older, they're told the sky is blue, the water is blue. And so they're not as creative and open-minded. Well, that was one reason why she also started the Alvarado Arts Workshop. In 1968, dissatisfied with the arts curriculum at her children's public school, she co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop, developing arts curriculum in the San Francisco public school system. Children can learn that they have control over their own space and their own environment. And by producing a mural on the wall, they're making history for themselves. And they begin to talk about what they've done rather than what somebody else has done. It had a huge impact on public arts education. She was very generous, generous, generous. And this house was always unlocked. People would just show up a lot of times at dinner. She was a fantastic cook. That's why all these people came right around dinner time. When Buckminster Fuller came to dinner, we knew we were going to have steak because Bucky likes steak. Living here, I still expect people to just walk in the door because that's what it was like. I think because she was an oppressed person being Japanese and put in camp, that made her more sympathetic for people that need help. She involved the community in a lot of her work. She always said she really enjoyed working with her children. And I think that was one way for her to get to know us and for us to get to know her better. I've worked on a lot of her last commissions because I was studying art. And so I worked on the San Jose internment. One of Asawa's last public commissions was titled the Japanese Internment Memorial. We find Asawa reflecting on her own history and the history of her extended community some 50 years after her own experience of being incarcerated. If you look at Asawa's practice, you see this porosity between disciplines, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, public commissions. As she develops as an artist, there's all this confusion about her. They don't recognize her sculptures as sculpture because they are suspended. They're not on a pedestal. And then she's a Japanese American and she's a woman. She's not part of white male culture out there in New York. She's not recognized. But she's free to kind of develop the way she wants to develop because there aren't a lot of people jumping in and commenting on what you should be doing. Is this school or that school? She's kind of left alone. What remained constant was Asawa's ceaseless experimentation, unabating curiosity in materials, and her deep interest in nature. Asawa developed a kind of second formal innovation with wire. Tied wire sculptures, as she called them. Instead of looping, she bundled hundreds upon hundreds strands of wire. When people looked at it, they said, that looks too realistic. Then I said, I'll reverse it. And it grew like this, like this. And then everyone was pleased because they said, now you're abstracting it. But actually, it was more realistic because this became the root system. And that became the leaves and branches. Here's my parents' garden. And they planted everything. And I've managed to keep everything sort of alive. My father liked to grow flowers. She preferred to grow vegetables. I think that nature was her goddess. She loved to draw plants and flowers. As she got older, it was maybe more difficult for her to make sculpture. She did more plant drawings that she could just do right at the kitchen table. She was constantly depicting the plants in her garden, the vegetables that she grew. Often, these drawings really began with a gesture of generosity. Bouquets of flowers that were given to her by family and friends. As she got older and she lost use of her hands because neuropathy and stuff, I thought she would have a real decline. But she lived for like five more years. She was perfectly happy without that. She'd kind of done everything she needed to do, I guess. I really enjoy everything that I do. I'm really concerned with how much I can pack into one day, then into nine months or a year. I'm really concerned with every single day. When you put a seed in the ground, the ground doesn't say, well, eight hours, I'm going to stop growing. That you put it in the soil, that ball grows every second that it's attached to the earth. That's why I think that every minute that we're attached to this earth, we should be doing something.