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In 1949 Asawa married a fellow student, Albert Lanier, and they established residence in San Francisco, where Albert has practiced architecture and Ruth has followed her life of wife-mother-artist-civic leader. She has always believed that an artist-mother should produce her art at home and even ask help from her children. Asawa's art, which has grown at home along with her six children, has always been shared by her whole family along with the household chores. 

Her first sculptural experiments were with crocheted wire, a method to which she was exposed in Mexico during the summer of 1947. At first simple forms, these works developed into complex sculptures which worked down from the ceiling, swelled in and out, perhaps five or six times, and rounded off to a close at the bottom. The loosely knit wire pieces were light, transparent, rhythmic shapes, exposing inside and out to the viewer. Asawa's subsequent explorations of these mesh hanging structures led to the addition of spherical shapes within shapes and pieces that fanned out like flowers with rippled edges. She discovered that by hanging a cluster of four or five in some space, overlapping, shadowing and new spaces could be observed. 
     
Her crocheted sculptures were exhibited widely and lauded internationally. One critic described them as "the most original and satisfying new sculpture to have arisen in the Western United States since World War II." Major examples can be seen in this exhibition including a twelve foot piece that was exhibited in the 1955 Sao Paulo Biennal. 
    
A whole new direction in her wire sculpture evolved during the 60's. In an effort to understand the linear manner in which a planet had grown, Asawa took wire, formed it into six parallel bundles, tied the bundles into a trunk, and traced the structure of the plant and its branching with each bundle. She later added synthetic resin drops to the tips to affect drops to dew, cast some of these works in bronze and add weight and substance to others with electroplating. 

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