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PHOTO: LAWRENCE CUNEO

RUTH ASAWA

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO A RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1973, 7:30 TO 11:00 BAXTER ART GALLERY / CALTECH / PASADENA

Ruth Asawa is by now nearly a public institution in San Francisco. Her recently installed fountain at the Hyatt House just off Union Square is a major tourist attraction; she is an art commissioner for the city; and she is the driving force behind a new and successful art program in the San Francisco schools. The daughter of truck farmers from Norwalk, California, she lived her early years close to the earth, contained in the discipline of a Zen Buddhist family. War and its hysteria sent her to a relocation camp at the Santa Anita race track, where she had a wonderful piece of luck. She made friends with several interned artists and began to draw seriously. From relocation camp she eventually found her way to the astonishing experiment in higher education, Black Mountain College. There she worked in an atmosphere of artistic discipline and philosophical expansiveness created by Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller. The variety of her background finds its way into her art--we see there joy in and oneness with nature, restraint and discipline, close observation and a good hand (Albers insisted on that), openness to ideas and willingness to experiment (Fuller wouldn't settle for less). Her crocheted and tied wire sculptures represent an absolutely original departure, a new use of materials, rooted in both nature and idea. Recently she has been involved in something approaching communal art, working with large numbers of people, often with children, directing them in group artistic endeavors. Her unsigned Hyatt House fountain is the product of many hands--aged from 3 to 90. Working with a homely material, baker's clay, using kitchen tools, she organized the talents of the many as a mother would those of her family. To call her "wife, mother, civic leader, artist, teacher," is not to point out the fragments of her diversity but, rather, to insist upon her unity and integrity.