Ruth Asawa: documentary on an artist who “worked every minute“.
Via The Museum of Modern Art: Discover Ruth Asawa, one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century, and the enduring legacy of her radical and unflagging experiments with materials and form. We visit Asawa’s San Francisco home and garden and bring together rare archival footage and photographs to show how her art, daily life, and commitment to community were inseparable. The video traces Asawa’s biography from her childhood in a family of Japanese immigrant farmers, to her incarceration during World War II, to her transformative education at Black Mountain College, and her prolific career and later life in San Francisco. Learn how she developed her groundbreaking looped wire sculptures that redefined modern sculpture by suspending it in space, and found endless inspiration in nature’s forms. The video also highlights Asawa’s role as an educator and activist, including her founding of the Alvarado Arts Workshop and her lasting impact on public arts education in California. Through family memories, a curatorial interview, and Asawa’s own words, this documentary reveals an artist who believed that “every minute that we’re attached to this earth, we should be doing something.”
0:00–1:32 Intro to Ruth Asawa
1:32–2:46 Biography and incarceration
2:46–4:41 Black Mountain College
4:41–7:10 Beginning of looped wire sculpture
7:10–8:34 Evolving her sculptural forms
8:34–9:27 Impact on her children
9:27–12:16 Community and public works
12:16–14:00 Inspired by nature
14:00–15:58 Plant drawings
Teaching kids with Ruth Asawa’s approach:
From MoMA: Artist Ruth Asawa believed that art was part of everyday life. She used simple materials to make sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings, and public art. Many of her monuments, which can still be seen throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in California, where she lived and worked, were a result of collaboration in which Asawa invited the local community, especially children, to contribute. Artist and teacher Syd Abady brought that same spirit into a workshop at MoMA with second graders from New York’s public schools. As she explained, Asawa “really did think of [children] as collaborators.” The students made clay sculptures inspired by the parks and neighborhoods where they live in New York. Together, they built a collective artwork made up of many small pieces, just as Asawa did with her students in San Francisco, and this project was featured in the MoMA exhibition “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective.” Turn this into an activity with your children or students with the activity here: https://www.moma.org/magazine/article…
Christina Ann Rinaldi 