Viewing page 41 of 55
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
“Ruth Asawa’s webs of wonder, called “sculpture” for want of a better word, lace the upper reaches of a de Young Gallery. ---these hanging forms are knitted with brass and iron wire with the patience and art of a spider or an Oriental. The delicate forms of this Japanese-American are knows form sea to shining sea. Completely unique, they suggest only themselves or, with their sense of growth, air plants. Some drop on a fine strand, develop a bulb, drop again and redevelop. others leaf out. There are glistening globes within dark ones recalling the ingenuity and patience of the Chinese carving ivory balls one within another. Gently turning, catching and reflecting the light, these airy shapes seem less real than the shadows they cast. Here sculpture has been included in numerous important exhibits and presented in one-man shows at New York's Stable and Peridot galleries." Miriam Dungam Cross "---Manhattan gallerygoers crowded two shows that uniquely bridged East and West. Both were important sculpture exhibitions and both were by Japanese-Americans: Isamu Noguchi and Ruth Asawa. Ruth Asawa studied under Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College. If Noguchi's ceramics demonstrate a certain grinning bounciness in the Japanese heritage, Asawa's wire constructions show the opposite side: austerity and calm. In their openness, delicacy and symmetry they somewhat resemble blossoms, odorless, colorless outsize, yet refreshing to contemplate. Noguchi and Asawa share on quality of Oriental art that Western artists often lack: economy of means. Their Japanese ancestors devoted vast efforts to making a single brush stroke look easy. By confining themselves to simple shapes made of patted mud and woven wire respectively, Noguchi and Asawa also achieved a pleasing quality of ease and oneness with their work. Judged by one standard of art, i.e., the proportion of visible effort to effect their sculptures stand high." TIME "Miss Asawa's exhibition (de Young Museum) consists largely of hanging sculptures. The transparent forms---flowing freely and hanging freely from the ceiling---are extraordinarily rich in design and equally rich in emotional connotation. Often these shapes incorporate other shapes, sometimes in very complicated ways; there may be as many as five tissues of knitted wire, each differing in shape and color, one enclosing another, in a single work. Sometimes Miss Asawa turns in the opposite direction; instead of enclosure, openness becomes her theme, and then the sculpture is like a glistening monumental abstraction of foliage and flowers. All in all, Miss Asawa possesses one of the most original, unprecented styles of any sculptor in America. Alfred Frankenstein S.F. Chronicle Color photograph on cover of Ruth Asawa's door and sculpture is by Paul Hassel
