Almost always, when I go to an art exhibition, I am as curious about how the artist came to make the works as I am about the visual experience of the art. This was particularly true of the recent exhibition at the MoMA with Ruth Asawa.

The weightlessness of her sculptures struck me, particularly the way the light cast shadows through the wires on the wall. The entire sixth floor of the museum was filled with Asawa’s art, 300 pieces, and this is the largest women’s retrospective that MOMA has ever had.

Asawa’s Japanese immigrant family of nine were farmers in California until World War II, when her family, like 120,000 other Japanese, were forced into Detention Camps with armed guards. They first lived in two tiny, stinking horse stalls, and then in bleak tar paper barracks in Arkansas. Asawa’s passion for art blossomed as her gregarious personality led her to other detainees who taught her, using whatever refuse was available.  

She had her first New York City solo show in 1955 and achieved commercial success soon after that. This is impressive for a woman at that time! Wire sculptures were rare then, and her creations were especially innovative and beautiful. 

She wanted six children, just like the family she grew up in. So she and her husband did just that within ten years. How could this woman be so wildly productive and mother all those children? Her close friends say she had a work ethic like none they had ever seen and needed no more than four or five hours of sleep. Hard physical labor had been a part of her life since birth, and she involved all the kids in chores at home and in the studio. After educating her children, many of her contributions later in life were in art education at both the local and national levels.

While Asawa had exceptional talent and personality, she also worked extremely hard. Many people think of art as all fun, but as artists, we know that to have any degree of success, much hard and sometimes uninteresting work is involved. She is a female success story at a time when there were few stories about women, fewer about foreign women, a female Horatio Alger.

Thank you to New England Wax member Donna Hamil Talman for her review of this show. Learn more about Donna at her website.

Donna founded The Snowball Effect Project, which aims to increase our awareness about how to keep the Earth livable.