Ruth Asawa Connected Everything

Unlike her contemporary Louise Bourgeois, whose work often explicitly depicted motherhood as a bodily passion play, Asawa rarely made motherhood the subject of her work. Rather, motherhood was its amniotic fluid: As curator Helen Molesworth has memorably put it, her lobed sculptures, with their forms-within-forms, connected and continuous, have a “fetal energy.”

As Troeller discusses at great length, Asawa devoted much of her time not to making art about mothering, but to scaling up her artist-mothering to citywide level—what Troeller calls “caretaking in public.” Asawa, along with her friends, neighbors, and fellow artist-mothers Andrea Jepson, Sharon Litzky, and Sally Woodbridge, proposed, organized, and secured funding for the nation’s first artist-led curriculum in a public school system, the Alvarado School Arts Workshop. The pilot program began in 1968, and a decade later, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized it as the most vital arts program in the country, operating at 80 percent of San Francisco’s public schools. Artists led children in creating mosaics, sculptures, textiles, and gardens to brighten their own schoolyards. Asawa had her old friend Buckminster Fuller stop by to make geometrical sculptures out of plastic straws.

The current show offers a bright side gallery, set up like a classroom, honoring this aspect of Asawa’s work and recognizing it as art work in its own right. This is the most archival of the galleries, and its charm is quiet—a photocopied guide to creating milk carton sculptures, a typewritten page of children’s answers to the question, “What do you think it means to be an artist?” Lest you worry that this is just an homage to the lost years of national arts funding, the gallery holds 12 colorful bas-relief murals made in painted baker’s clay from public schools across New York’s five boroughs, created this year by schoolchildren under the direction of a working artist. Our city, in their eyes, is bright and blue-skied, full of rats and pizza, rainbows and trees and children.