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fantasy like Superman flying past the Montgomery Street skyscrapers over Snoopy lying on his dog house. The total effect is of a world both real and unreal which anyone can enter at will.

While she organized the subject matter, Ruth's architect husband, Albert Lanier, made plans for a full-scale wooden model of the drum, 14 feet in diameter and 1 to 10 feet high from top to bottom of the steps. Hector Villaneuva, a pattern maker, built the model of 41 curved panels bolted together and set in a flight of wooden steps just as it would be on the site. The size of the panels, 26 by 32 inches except for those near the top of the stairs, was set by the foundry's casting requirements. When completed the model was moved into the Laniers back yard for its metamorphosis from wood to bronze.

Most artists, having received a commission, proceed to shut themselves up in their studio devoting long, lonely hours to the process of creation. Ruth had a different approach. Years of working in groups with family and friends gave her a new philosophy:

Since we have no real folk art or craft tradition any more in this country, this kind of activity has to be recreated to bring families and communities together. No one feels he has to be an artist to work in dough with kitchen utensils. When we started a community art program with parents, teachers, and children working together in school it was natural to use dough sculpture on large panels which everyone could work on. When the fountain came along I thought it was a great opportunity to show how group skills could be used to make something that people usually think of as high art - one product from one person's mind and hands. We have this egocentric idea that the artist has to do his own thing alone. Because of this I think art has become weaker in many ways and less able to satisfy us. There have always been great individuals in art, but great art has also been produced by skilled people working together. It is the idea of bringing skills together that interests me. We see this in science, in the space program, but we have lost it in art. The idea that the artist makes a drawing of what's in his head and then gives it to a fabricator who makes it isn't the same thing. There should be more interaction than that. People working together learn to do each other's thing; they have a greater understanding of the product.

Needless to say Ruth had no trouble recruiting helpers. Mae Lee her assistant on the Ghiradelli fountain, and Mae Lee's daughter, Mei Mei; Sally Woodbridge, who shared the school art program as well as many years of working in dough; Ruth's older daughter, Aiko, also a veteran dough artist; and her mother, Haru Asawa, worked steadily along with the many, many friends. Together their loving hands have helped produce the fountain that Ruth has dedicated with equal love to the children of San Francisco.

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