SFMOMA Ruth Asawa Retrospective Celebrates Her Art and Life as Educator
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From Kiki Weedy in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Ruth Asawa was a sculptor and artist who, in her own words, invested in San Francisco. And we are so lucky that she did. A new retrospective at SFMOMA shows off how gorgeous her work really was from the mid-1940s until the 2000s when she made her last tender drawings of the plants in her garden.

We'll talk about her celebrated woven wire sculptures, as well as her legacy in the Bay Area art world with an SFMOMA curator and people who knew and were influenced by Asawa. It's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Let me get this out of the way. The new Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA is outstanding. One reason is that Asawa's famous gossamer wire sculptures are simply gorgeous and mesmerizing. They recall simple organic forms and also the 20th century reckoning forced by Einstein's reconceptualizing space-time. How a material so simple could be woven into such complex, multilayered art is nothing short of miraculous.

But in the context of this exhibition, the well-known sculptures serve as our portal to the rest of Asawa's work, which is also tremendous. One quick example, before she moved to San Francisco, Asawa went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was assigned to work in the laundry room. She took an ink stamp with the letters BMC from her job and began to make art, creating intricate spiraling patterns.

In the center of each design, the seas come closer and closer together until they begin to interlock, forming inky chains that recall nothing more than Asawa's woven wire technique in her sculptures.

It's a breathtaking moment right there in the first room, a bit of museum magic created by the context that the curators of the show created. And there are many such revelations available for the curious and attentive attendee. This is as good as a museum exhibit gets as far as I'm concerned. And I'm delighted to welcome the co-curator of the show as we take stock of Asawa's life and legacy too as part of our Bay Area Legends series.

Janet Bishop, SF MoMA's Thomas Weissel, Family Chief Curator and Co-Curator of Ruth Asawa Retrospective. Welcome to Forum. Thank you. Thanks so much for this exhibit. It's so good.

Ruth Asawa, beloved San Francisco artist and legend. But for those who, you know, just kind of recognize the name, but maybe can't picture the most famous work, these wire sculptures, maybe you could just describe that work that really put her on the art world stage.

So, Alexis, you mentioned her studies at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. And during that period, she made a trip to Mexico, to Toluca, Mexico, and learned a wire weaving technique that artisans there used to make baskets. And she tried it. She loved it.

And then in 1949, she closed up that form and suspended it from the ceiling. So in the very first gallery that you mentioned, which consists mostly of two-dimensional works that she made at Black Mountain College, we have a selection of her baskets and her very first suspended looped wire sculpture. When she moved to San Francisco in 1949...

She embarked on a period of tremendous creative output, really remarkable, where she created many, many themes and variations on that fundamental building block and ideas.

including her signature continuous forms within forms. So you really see this explosive creative output with wire, with suspended wire. And it's really, really extraordinary to see where she took that simple idea. Just kind of the core of it. But what does it look like? How would you describe these sort of hanging wire sculptures? They're sort of

bulbous, at least the ones that people most associate with her. She obviously used these forms to make all kinds of stuff, but the basic form, what does it look like?

So she never repeated herself. But the basic form is an orb or a lobe. It might just look like a sphere, for instance. But then she'd start in the middle and then work her way out. So there's often forms within forms. And then she expanded...

to create multi-lobed pieces. The work in S.F. MoMA's collection, for instance, is from around 1958 and it's nearly 11 feet high and consists of several lobes that are symmetrical. Sometimes she worked asymmetrically, sometimes they're teardrop shapes, sometimes it looks like a stack of witch hats, for instance.

So many variations on these organic forms. And all mesmerizing, as we're saying. Let's talk a little bit about who Ruth Asawa was. Where did she grow up? Who were her parents? How did she come into her artistic work?

Yeah. Asawa was born in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents. They were farmers. She grew up, I think, 17 miles southwest of Los Angeles in Norwalk, California. And then when she was a teenager, she and her family were incarcerated during World War II. And she spent a period of time at Santa Anita Racetrack,

And it was actually a sort of remarkable chapter in her young life where she worked alongside Walt Disney animators.

something that she recalled for the rest of her life. She then went to Arkansas, to Rohwer incarceration camp. She went to Milwaukee for a period of time with the goal of becoming an art teacher. She was not able to get a teaching credential because of anti-Japanese discrimination at the end of the war, and so went to Black Mountain College, where she really thrived within this experimental environment. Yeah, I mean, that environment sounds like it was

pretty wild, actually, right? You've got Buckminster Fuller, kind of futurist designer. You've got Joseph Albers. What was that place? I mean, did they even grant degrees? Like, they didn't when she first got there, right? No, it was not an accredited school, not a degree-granting college, but it was a magnet for a whole host of intensely

creative individuals, not an art school per se, but arts were really fundamental to the curriculum. And Asawa was a very, you know, she was a very resourceful person, very experimental person, always making. And, you know, to your point about how she made best use of her time as

during her student job in the laundry room, she really just never stopped. And the environment was really conducive for her. And she's picking up a bunch of features of the natural world there too, right? Like looking at the leaves, looking at the forms. And in particular, also looking at the people doing dancing, right? I mean, there's a wonderful moment in the exhibit when we see Asawa kind of dancing

looking off from the side of a dance class and starting to develop some of those kind of lobes or orbs as forms. Where do we think the inspiration beyond the actual technique of weaving, which you got from Toluca, Mexico, as you were talking about, where do we think the inspiration for some of the...

the making of these particular shapes came from? Like, what are the sort of factors that go into it? Well, one thing that she acknowledged later in life is that when she was a child on her parents' farm, they grew fruits and vegetables. She sat on the back of a truck and would make these patterns

patterns in the dirt with her feet and that mimic the shapes of, that relate to the shapes of the multi-lobed wire sculptures. And so she acknowledged much later on that it occurred to her that she had been obsessed with that sort of in and out pattern, you know, since her early childhood. I mean, where it came from, I think she took to working with wire. She very much appreciated the

the transparency, the positive and negative shapes, the shadows, just the potential of a very simple medium. One thing that she said was that, you know, an artist is someone who takes ordinary materials and makes them special. And I can't think of anybody who did that better than Ruth Asawa. I also love to quote that from the exhibit, I've tried to make use of the space inside and find that what is an outer surface can become insidious.

and inner surface is such a beautiful way of thinking about it. Let's listen to one short cut here of Ruth Asawa. It's the same principle of the negative, positive shapes that move me into working in the wire. And when we think about the negative space, we think about looking at some of these Asawa forms, the shadows become this massively important way of understanding what's going on. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

how you thought about lighting it so that you can see the shadows in these various forms. We're lucky at SFMOMA to have on our technical team Rico Salinas, who is an artist. He was actually one of the first teachers at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. And he is a lighting genius. In thinking about how we wanted to approach the lighting for the Ruth Asawa retrospective,

he looked at installation views from past Ruth Asawa exhibitions, from her exhibitions that occurred during her lifetime to see how they were lit. And one very fundamental aspect

one thing that he shared with me was that if you put one light on a sculpture, you get one shadow. If you put two, you get two shadows. And so in most cases, we went for one shadow rather than two and decided to reveal more about the sculpture through the shadows, but not go so dramatic that the shadows and the artwork sort of become indistinguishable.

There's also a quote from her in the show that the shadow will reveal an exact image of the object. Do you think we were supposed to take that literally or do you think she's just kind of playing with our kind of expectations? I don't know.

I don't know about literally, but sometimes the shadow looks quite a lot like the object depending on the angle. If the work of art itself is not symmetrical, you might get a very different view of the object through its shadow, which is really fascinating. That's so interesting.

We are talking about Bay Area legend and artist Ruth Asawa. SFMOMA has just opened a retrospective of her work. It's going to be up through September 5th before it starts traveling the world to New York, to Bilbao in Spain, and to Switzerland. We're joined by Janet Bishop, who is co-curator of Ruth Asawa Retrospective and the chief curator at SFMOMA. We'd love to hear from you. I mean, Ruth Asawa says...

that she invested in San Francisco. And we want to know if you were influenced by that investment affected by her work or her work in the community. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-

6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org. Or of course, you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, the Discord community. We're KQED Forum. We'll be back with more right after the break. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned. ♪

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Gardening is a true information. It's honest information that can be applied to in many ways. The gardening can be a source for subject matter for an artist. It can be a source for studying science or it could be a source for studying mathematics. It could be a source for many, many subjects.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about Ruth Asawa, artist, legend, San Franciscan, and as you just heard, gardener. If you ever see me with gardening as a true information back tattoo, you'll know where I got it from. We're joined by Janet Bishop, head curator at SFMOMA, co-curator of a new exhibit of Asawa's life and work,

A major, major retrospective taking up, I think it's like six galleries. It's huge. Twelve galleries. Twelve galleries. Oh, man. It is an experience. An experience. Let's talk a little bit about the role that the natural world played in Asawa's life and work.

There's a really wonderful, entirely different set of sculptures. They look different. They're these kind of tied wire pieces. Can you describe for us what those look like?

Yeah. So throughout the 50s, Asawa was primarily occupied with the looped wire sculptures. And then in 1962, her friends Paul Hassel and Virginia Hassel gave her a desert plant. She tried to draw it and wasn't satisfied with the results. So she turned to wire.

and made the very first of what have become known as her Tidewire sculptures. It looks like a little tree, and it's mounted on a wooden block. That led to a major sculptural kind of innovation of the 1960s, where she used either wire from spools or bundles of straight wire to create –

I'd say in some cases sort of wreath-like or tree-like forms that start with a star or a series of petals at the center and move out from there. They're absolutely beautiful, and we're thrilled to have a whole gallery devoted to these works. Yeah, they're also...

They are tree-like in some cases, but they're not like an imitation of a tree, right? Like they have this natural form, but they're almost like an abstraction of some kind of ideal natural form. Yeah, they definitely connect very directly to nature, but she's not trying to mimic actual trees or branches. We've got some people who knew Ruth. Let's bring in Barry in San Francisco.

Hey Alexis, thanks very much for taking my call and thanks for having this show. I want to say first that I saw the beautiful exhibit on Monday and I'm going back again. It was magnificent so kudos to Miss Bishop for a spectacularly beautiful job. I wanted to say that I was lucky in my life to become

become friends with Ruth Asawa, she, for periods of time, would have open studios. That's how I met her. I walked in one day when her gate was open and she was showing her art and masks that were outside the house. But I began to be able to visit her. And I'd also like to acknowledge that

Her daughter, Aiko, as Ruth became more infirm and aged, Aiko assiduously ensured that I could still go visit her and show her the work that I was doing, which at the time was blacksmithing and metalwork.

work and she would show me what she was doing. And it was one of the greatest joys of my life. I honestly mean that it was such a joy. She was so inspiring. She would talk to me and like, I, I felt that I was moments. I felt I was going to cry watching that walking through that show on Monday. It was so beautiful, so beautifully installed. I saw things that I didn't know about her work and,

And I loved Ruth Asawa. She was a beautiful woman. She was a spectacular community member. And, you know, everywhere in the city is better because of what she did, bringing arts into the school. So thank you for letting me say this. I just love the show. And I'm so happy Ruth is getting the much-deserved attention she always, always deserved. Barry, thank you so much for that call. Thank you.

She obviously had such an impact on not just the art world, but the local San Francisco community as well. I want to bring in another close friend of Ruth Asawa, Andrea Jepson, who actually served as the model for The Fountain, Andrea, and worked with Asawa on public school education projects. Welcome to the show. Thank you.

So tell us how you knew her. How did you know her? Well, I met her in—we lived in Noe Valley around the corner from each other. And I met her in 1964 and immediately had a connection with her. She used to come over to my house and draw me. So there are lots and lots of drawings from that time. Wow.

How did she ask you to model for the mermaid in the sculpture in Giardelli Square? Well, one of the times that she was drawing me, she asked about, and I was pregnant, she asked if she could do a model of my, a sculptor of my body pregnant. And I thought, oh, no, I don't think so. But once I had the baby, she still wanted to do a,

Like a look into what it's like to be a nursing mother. And that's when she did a whole plaster bandage sculpture. So it's actually a... I wasn't a model per se. It's a sculpture of my body. Yeah. I also hear that there is actually a KQED Ruth Asawa and you connection. Can you tell us that story? I will. So...

In 1967, I was watching KQED, which I did a lot, and they used to raise money by having an auction on the air.

And it was dinner time and when her piece came up and the bidding was going fairly slowly, probably because people just weren't watching at that moment. So I thought, oh, I'm going to bid it up and see where it goes because this is not enough money.

And so I bid it up to $300, and then I got the sculpture. It ended there. And I was freaked out because we were artists, as most people around us were at that time. We were living on $300 a month. But the next, and free credit card. So you had three days to get your money and pick it up.

And it was a beautiful tied wire sculpture, really gorgeous. So the next day in the mail, my mother sent me a check for $300 for the new baby. Of course, I immediately turned it into a check for K3D. And then many years later,

I sold the sculpture and went to Sicily with my family, which is where I'm from. I'm not from there, but my family is from there. And thought about Ruth the whole time. That's great.

One listener writes in to say, you know, could you talk about her marriage to fellow artist Albert Lanier? I've always found their love story inspiring. Interracial marriage was illegal in all but two states when they met, but they remained together for over 60 years. Janet, do you want to start talking? Absolutely. Yeah. So Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier met when they were fellow students at Black Mountain College. Yeah.

Albert was studying architecture, and he was the first to move to San Francisco. A friend of theirs, Peggy Tolk Watkins, told him that he could get a fantastic plate of spaghetti and a glass of red wine for a dollar, and that they should really consider San Francisco. And so Asawa followed Lanier in 1949. That was the year they married with a

wedding ring designed by Buckminster Fuller made of sterling. That was late. Didn't make it there in time for the wedding. No, sterling silver and a river rock, right? But they were an absolutely devoted couple for the rest of their lives. They had a long, very happy marriage.

They raised six children together. You know, they they they said having dinner together every night was the most important thing. They were mutually supportive of each other's careers. It was it was a very long, happy, productive marriage. Is it refreshing to put on the work of someone who's not an art monster, who's kind of like the opposite, actually?

I mean, it was really, really inspiring, not only to work with Asawa's, you know, very, like her absolutely fantastic body of work, you know, which takes many different forms, not only the sculpture, but the works on paper and public works, but to also, you know, consider her as a person and her experience.

incredible spirit of generosity really infused everything about the exhibition. That's cool. Let's go to Barbara in San Francisco, who I think wants to talk about the Ghirardelli Square fountain, but also other work. Barbara, welcome.

Oh, thank you. I have adored that fountain at Ghirardelli Square for decades. I've spent my whole adulthood in San Francisco. But I want to call attention to another piece of her work. It is on Stockton Street between Poston and Sutter, on the west side of Stockton, and it's in a hotel patio. And it is a fountain, and on the outside of it,

are little figures, all kinds of little figures, originally probably made of clay, with the help of children. In other words, these little figures encrust the whole outer part of the cylindrical slice of a fountain there. So it's worth stopping by to see. Yeah.

Yeah. And appreciate. Absolutely. There's a great piece in the show about sort of this work with children. Janet, do you want to talk to us a little bit on it? Sure. The piece you're referring to, Barbara, is the San Francisco Fountain from the early 1970s that was commissioned by the Hyatt.

And it consists of 41 panels that wrap around like a drum to create this really fantastical view of San Francisco. It's so interesting because the first thing Asawa did in order to create this piece was to work with hundreds of people ranging in age from three to 80-something to

to create little figures and architectural models in streets. You see Lombard Street, you see City Hall, you see lots and lots of people. And then Asawa, they were made out of baker's clay, which was a sort of non-toxic material that she came up with in the early 60s to keep her kids busy.

But it turned into a serious sculptural medium for her. And she created these panels with a large community of students and others and then had them cast in bronze. Baker's clay itself is not a permanent material, but bronze certainly is. And that fountain is really a civic treasure. Let's listen in to Addie Lanier, one of Ruth's

Asawa's daughters describing the fountain here. And it's really cool because it is the outrageousness of San Francisco after the Summer of Love with the Peace March and the hippies and the protests and just the kind of craziness that was San Francisco at the time. Yeah.

Andrea, do you remember the creation of this piece or do you have any memories? I remember lots of people working on it. But we used that technique in the school. Alvarado was the first school. And I was very involved in the administration of that. And what Ruth wanted to do was bring artists in to work with the kids.

I think she knew every artist within maybe a three-mile radius of the school. And they all came because you couldn't say no. And she'd call, like, we both stayed up late. She'd call in the middle of the night and say, Andrea? Andrea?

And then, oh, I knew something was coming that we had to do. And it was always amazing. Yeah. Oh, how fun. Let's bring in Roberto in South San Francisco. Welcome.

Good morning. So I want to set the stage. This was about 1996, and I was teaching at the Schoolyards High School in San Francisco for the Peer Resources Program. These dynamic young folks were doing peer advocacy to dismantle racism, homophobia for young people doing peer health education. And at one point,

My funding was cut for my position. Ruth had decided,

had been super active on campus, even gardening, mentoring young artists, working to support teachers. She was there almost every day, like a volunteer elder spending time at a campus that she loved. And when she learned that my funding had been cut and that I had committed that I would continue working until they found funding to

to keep me. Um, she cut me a personal check directly to me for $2,500. And I was a part-time student, you know, part-time worker suddenly out of work and it, and it just meant the world to me and it helped keep me there until they finally found funding for me several months later. And I'll never forget that. So the school is not just named for her, um,

And, you know, just out of symbolism or recognition for her art, but also recognition for all the love and care and time that she put into that school. So I wanted to share that. Oh, Roberto, what a great story. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. You know, Jan Bishop, do you want to talk about the work that she did sort of across schools and universities?

working as someone, you know, going to school board meetings. Like she was very involved in so many different ways. Yeah. And, you know, as her own children started to, you know, become school age, you know, she was

I guess, less than impressed with the arts curriculum in the public schools in San Francisco at the time. And so she really made it her project to bring arts to public schools, partnering with fellow Noe Valley moms in particular. And as Andrea mentioned earlier, it started at

at Alvarado School in the late 1960s and then expanded by, I think, by the early 70s. The Alvarado Arts Workshop was in seven schools across the city. But, you know, her advocacy for arts really...

You know, it started very locally in the neighborhood, in her neighborhood of Noe Valley. You know, she became part of the Arts Commission in San Francisco. She became part of the California Arts Council on a statewide level. You know, she ended up becoming involved with projects with the NEA on a national level. You know, she was really tireless in her work.

in pursuing opportunities for artists and for students at every level. Let's hear Ruth Asawa talking about children. Children can learn that they have control over their own space and their own environment. And by producing Mirror on the Wall, they're making history for themselves. And they begin to talk about what they've done rather than what somebody else has done.

That was Ruth Asawa from the Robert Snyder documentary of form and growth talking about her work with children. We are, of course, talking about the Bay Area legend artist Ruth Asawa. SFMOMA just opened a retrospective of her work when I went yesterday. It was like a mob scene. People outside the doors at noon lining up.

The exhibit's going to be up through September 5th, and it's going to go to New York, Spain, and Switzerland. You can get there now. Joined by Janet Bishop, SF MoMA's chief curator, co-curator of Ruth Asawa Retrospective. We're also joined by Andrea Jepsen, who's a close friend of Ruth Asawa, as well as a model for the fountain, Andrea, in Ghirardelli Square.

We want to hear from you. If you've been influenced by, affected by Ruth's art or work in the community, give us a call. Number is 866-733-6786. These calls have been beautiful. You can also email your story to forum at kqed.org or you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, Discord. We're KQED Forum. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We are talking about Bay Area legend and artist Ruth Asawa. There is a new retrospective of her work up at SFMOMO. We're joined by the co-curator of the show, Janet Bishop. Also, we're joined by a close and longtime friend of Ruth Asawa, Andrea Jepsen.

You know, we're getting these calls and we're going to put more on in just a second. People telling stories about Ruth Sawa. And I just, Janet Bishop, you were saying that there's a story booth like in the exhibit where people can share these stories.

Yeah, right in the exhibition toward the end of the show, we have a story booth and we would really welcome visitors to the exhibition to share their Ruth Asawa stories. You can share yours, you can listen to others. I think it's a really wonderful part of the show. That's so cool. And I

You're also doing a bunch of events, right, that people can get in on and participate in? Yeah. If you go to sfmoma.org, you can see the full roster of events that we are organizing in conjunction with the Ruth Asawa Retrospective. Starting this Sunday, we have a free community day. So you can come to the museum free of charge. And then on April 27th,

April 27th, there'll be a program where friends and family of Ruth Asawa will be sharing the way in which she affected them, the way she has imprinted on their lives. Love that. All right. April 27th. Victor in San Francisco. Welcome.

Oh, hi. I'll just say I get nervous calling in. You're doing great. Yeah. Excuse me. I had two things I wanted to explore. One is about the sculptures outside of the SF General, which are very evocative of Ruth's work. I wonder if that artist had any connection with

Ruth Asawa. And then also, early on, you talked about working with mundane objects. And I was wondering if Ruth Asawa, either personally or sort of art historically, has been involved

in conversation with artists like one of my favorites, Louise Nevelson, or the other abstract expressionists like Rauschenberg and the others who just would pick up any kind of scrap and either attach it to

a painting or paint on it, et cetera. So... Yeah, Victor, appreciate that. Great observation. Yeah, great call. We don't know about SF General. I know that already. But let's talk about the making of work out of mundane objects. Some people trace this to Black Mountain College, don't they? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And Rauschenberg was also a student there. And they very much share that ethos. We have a fantastic piece from the early 1950s at SFMOMA by Robert Rauschenberg called Collection that makes use of all kinds of detritus that he was picking up, you know, in lower Manhattan at the time. But they're...

Ruth Asawa was incredibly resourceful. When her dishwasher broke, she just used it to store magazines and newspapers that could be used for folding paper, for origami. She kept everything and really anything could have a use as artistic material.

Let's bring in another guest. We have Terry Kohansky, the current executive director of Scrap, a creative reuse center that Ruth Asawa helped bring to life. Welcome to Forum, Terry. Thank you, Alex. It's so nice to be here. Tell us more about Scrap and Ruth Asawa's connection to it.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, Scrap, many people know Scrap in this city, but a lot of people don't know that Scrap really is Ruth's legacy and part of her investment in San Francisco. We are at the intersection of art, education,

and the environment. And really, we put the methods of art and art making in the hands of all. So really providing access for everybody to do art, which as we know, Ruth Asawa was, you know, believed so much that art was a part of, you know, human right, your human right.

And how did this sort of how does scrap actually work now? What can you find there? Oh, my gosh. What can't you find there? Have you been there? I have not. But producer Grace Wan is a huge fan. Oh, my God. It is absolutely incredible. You look at the outside of it and it looks like a 1940s warehouse, which it is.

But as soon as you walk in the door, you realize that this is the most amazing place you never knew you needed. I have many people say they walk in and it's like an Aladdin's cave. So, you know, we were talking about everyday objects and Ruth's belief in everyday objects for art making. And that's exactly what we are. We take what I would call self-salvage donations from

And we spark creativity. So we take things like fabric and yarn and canvas and paint and paint brushes and really spark creativity for the creative community, regardless of, you know, income and demographic. Everybody is welcome. I also before we let you go, I understand y'all are looking for a new space right now, too. Yeah.

We are. Thank you for bringing that up. Currently, we're in an SFUSD building, and they've been so generous with us over the years. But in the fall, a bond was passed for centralized kitchen there. So guess what? We need to go find a new space. So anybody who would like to help, please visit our website at scrap-sf.org, and you'll get more detail. Awesome.

Thanks so much, Terry Kohansky, Executive Director of SCRAP Creative Reuse Center. Thanks so much. Thank you, Alexis. Let's get back into Ruth Asawa's work. Mark in Dublin. Welcome.

Yeah, I was taken, actually, by the shape of one of the Thalys sculptures that I found online. It was untitled, but it reminded me of the type of work that was done by very advanced mathematicians. There's a Fields Medal-winning mathematician at Harvard named Xingcang Yao, very famous. His

whose field is differential geometry and it turns out that in his book uh... that the uh... i believe which is called the shape of life there's an essay in which uh... ruth is now is actually quoted uh... and uh... so i i i i don't have to go back and look at this is i'm sure this is where the connection came to me from

And I'm hoping that there's a reproduction of one of her pieces in the book. I know on the cover that there is a very symmetrical, very complicated geometrical structure, which is the kind of thing that Professor Yao works in. Anyway, I just thought that this was an amazing connection. No, I agree. I mean, I can't do that math, but I can appreciate it.

And as people did try and you see images that look Asawa-like in lots of different kind of mathematical contexts. I mean, one of the things that is kind of interesting about Black Mountain College, right, is that there is some cross-pollination, it feels like, between people who were doing different kinds of research.

and other quantitative fields and the artists who were there as well. Yeah, absolutely. And Asawa was taking classes not only with Buckminster Fuller but also with mathematician Max Dane. She herself did not... She didn't consider herself to be good at math per se, but she had an unbelievable ability to figure things out. And I think one of the astonishing things about the exhibition and her work is just the sense of warmth

Yeah.

Actually, just astonishingly, a comment just came in kind of on this topic. Eric writes in to say,

I told her how I'd been reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, about the physicist Feynman, Richard Feynman, and the descriptions of it...

of him visualizing complex physics as three dimensional forms reminded me of her work. They look like universes. She laughed and said, that's reminded me. That's so wonderful. I love that you see them in that way. Then she changed the subject to asking what I was doing in art school and what my goals were. I'll never forget, uh, that night. Um, so great. Uh,

Evan writes, in 2009, Ruth Asawa donated a wooden work table made by her husband with the hope that the Bethany Center senior residents could gather, share, and create with one another. Ten years later, Ruth's table is a nonprofit community gallery and art-making space open to all. We're thrilled to be partnering with SFMOMA for Community Day honoring Ruth Asawa this Sunday, April 13th, 10 to 5. So there we have that as well.

I mean, if there's one lesson that really comes out of this, not just the retrospective, but Ruth Asawa's life, it does seem to be that like a single person can have a truly outsized impact in the life of a city. Right. I mean, it just seems like it's hard to imagine someone who's had a greater impact in individual lives in San Francisco.

Yeah, I would agree. One thing that Addie Lanier, her daughter, said to me one time was that a calendula spreads a thousand seeds. And it's really such a perfect metaphor for Ruth Asawa. Yeah. You know, at the end of her life, and there's a beautiful – that's also at the end of the exhibition –

We do see her kind of returning to these botanicals, these, you know, there were gardeners all around her, her husband, children. And tell me more about that sort of phase where she kind of returns to some painting, she returns to some drawing.

Yeah, she, in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, she focused really intently on drawings, particularly of flowers and bouquets, things that grew in her garden. They're absolutely exquisite. And so we closed the exhibition with a large gallery of dozens of these drawings. She, like her sculpture, she would advise artists

advise people to start in the middle and work their way out. You know, consider where you would want the bouquet or the plant to sit on a page and start in the middle and then take it from there. Most of them are ink drawings. She's used some other mediums as well, like watercolor. But they're really exquisite, and they're among...

the few works in the exhibition that are titled. They often have inscriptions that say things like... So-and-so's bouquet. Yeah, exactly. Roses from Albert or Valentine's bouquet from Adam. How did she explain her sort of return to...

drawing and painting? Well, she was always... She was drawing and painting all along. The recent exhibition that was at the Whitney Museum in Manil was focused on drawing and argued that it was a through line of her entire

entire practice. But toward her, in her later years, she was less physically capable of making large-scale sculpture and just continued to find inspiration in the plants and flowers that were right around her.

And so she even applied for a grant saying that she wanted to focus on the flowers that her husband, Albert Lanier, grew. And she did not get the grant, but she focused on flowers nonetheless. Live where you live, you know.

We are going to play one more cut from her daughters talking about their mom. Of course, you can find more videos and audios about Asawa on the Ruth Asawa website, which is run by her family members as well. Let's hear her on resourcefulness. She always knew how to put on a meal for 10 on absolutely nothing. And she knew how to do the art project with 300 schoolchildren together.

in two days she just knew how to stretch the resources available to do what you want to do without thinking of the limitations that have been imposed upon you that's would be a sour that's a good verb to a sour it's that's what you do you go and you try and optimize what's in front of you go forward yeah

Andrea Jepsen, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Like how you saw her working with what she had right in front of her? I saw you nodding about, you know, making a dinner for 10 out of nothing. Yes, that was, and it was always delicious. She was a great cook. The house was filled with people. There was a lot of coming and going. At one point,

Hudson, her son was getting married and there were lots of people in the house and I was catering the wedding. So I had to stay behind. And they all left in a great flurry of cars and we have to get there, we're late. And they all left, it got very quiet. And then Hudson came out of the back room and they had forgotten him.

And then there was a lot of laughing about that later on. Oh, yeah, we forgot the groom. She was very attentive and resourceful. I mean, those very... We started that program with $50. So we were begging constantly. The school's program. The school's program, yeah. And that's how Scrap...

It started because we would get rolls of beautiful paper and rolls from a printing company. And you find out that if you ask for something, you can get it. Well, she always got it because everyone paid attention to her.

Janet Bishop, co-curator of the show, do you want to tell people something they might not know to go seek out in this exhibition, in this retrospective that they should maybe go take a look for? Well, one of the galleries in the exhibition is different than the others. The show follows the arc of her six-decade-long career, but we've also created a space that evokes

her Noe Valley living room. And that's something that I wouldn't want people to miss. It includes not only examples of her own work that hung from the rafters in the central living space in her home, but also work by friends of hers, things that she treasured, things that she lived with, pieces by Joseph Albers or by Peggy Tolk Watkins or by Marguerite Wildenhain.

And so there's case after case of things there that I think people might enjoy seeing, things that Asawa herself surrounded. - Including a cast of her hands, which I-- - Yes, a cast of her hands. - That would be my recommendation. Go seek that out just so you can see who made all this work. We have been talking about the Bay Area legend and artist Ruth Asawa. SF Moma's got this retrospective up. Get yourself to it, it's so good.

We've been joined by the co-curator of the show and SFMOMA's chief curator overall, Janet Bishop. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Alexis. We've also been joined by Andrea Jebson, a close friend of Ruth Asawa, who's been telling us some stories. Thanks so much for joining us. It was such a pleasure. Earlier, we talked with Terry Kohansky, executive director of SCRAP, nonprofit education and creative reuse center based in the Bayview, founded in 1976 that Ruth Asawa helped bring into being.

The 9 o'clock hour forum is produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, and Tessa Paoli. Our interns are Brian Vo and Jesse Fisher. Jennifer Ng is our engagement producer. Francesca Fenzi is our digital community producer. Judy Campbell's lead producer. Danny Bringer, Christopher Beal are our engineers. Katie Springer is the operations manager of KQED Podcasts. Our vice president of news is Ethan Toven-Lindsey. And our chief content officer is Arne.

Holly Kernan. There are a bunch of events going on at SF MoMA. Check out those over the next month. We want to give Ruth Asawa the last word here. Here she is from the 1978 documentary of Foreman Growth, Ruth Asawa. When you put a seed in the ground, the ground doesn't say, well, eight hours, I'm going to stop growing. You put it in the soil and

That bulb grows every second that it's attached to the earth. That's why I think that every minute that we're attached to this earth, we should be doing something. That's your final word. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hey, it's Glenn Washington, the host of the Snap Judgment Podcast. At Snap, we tell cinematic stories that let you feel what it's like inside someone else's skin. Stories that let you walk in someone else's footsteps. Storytelling like you've never heard. The highs, the lows, the joys, the pain, the twists, the turns, the laughs, the life. Snap Judgment drops each and every week. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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