To Design Is to Plan and Organize

摘要

In a 1957 photograph by her friend Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Asawa sits on the floor of her San Francisco house surrounded by four of her children and two of her sculptures. A new sculpture is in the works; two more children are on the way. The undulating wire sculptures, suspended from above, inhabit the room like honorary members of the family. It was all work for Asawa. She likened both child-rearing and art making to the incremental progress of cultivating crops. She would know, having grown up working the land on her immigrant parents' farm outside Los Angeles. At 16, Asawa and her family were sent to a Japanese internment camp, where she honed her drawing skills and got her high school diploma. Denied jobs because of her race, in the summer of 1946 she found a progressive oasis in Black Mountain College, an experimental school in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she began studying art with former Bauhaus master Josef Albers.