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CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109

INSTITUTE ART PROGRAM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RUTH ASAWA: A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW

"Ruth Asawa: a Retrospective View", a large exhibition tracing the career of one of San Francisco's most celebrated and diversified artists, will open the season at the Baxter Art Gallery, Caltech, October 5 through November 11.

The 120 work exhibition documents Asawa's extensive activity in a variety of media -- from her earliest wire sculpture of the 50's to her current involvement with art in the public educational system. Also included will be drawings and water-colors, and the original bakers' clay panels used in casting the bronze Hyatt House foundation at Union Square, San Francisco. The exhibition was organized by former San Francisco Museum of Art Director and now Director of the gallery at U.C.L.A., Gerald Nordland and is documented by a fully illustrated catalog.

Ruth Asawa was born and raised in the agricultural community of Norwalk, California, where her Japanese parents operated a vegetable truck farm. Her artistic talents were duly encouraged in the elementary grades and high school but her first concentrated art experience took place in a camp while awaiting internment during World War II. At that time, West Coast Japanese- American families were uprooted from their homes and moved into relocation centers. Separated from her normal routine of farm work and school activity, she spent as many as five hours a day for six months making drawings under the tutelage of Tom Okamoto, a landscape artist and Disney studio veteran.

According to Asawa, her most important development as an artist and as a person took place at Black Mountain College where she studied under Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller. Albers not only taught his students art and design but he also presented a way of thinking and even a way of life. Buckminster Fuller passed on to his students a philosophy of non- productive-mindedness in order for them to explore their own unique capacities for creativity. Asawa claims that the ideas of these two men have given her the strength to keep her own identity and pursue her own priorities rather than those of the "art world".