Ruth Asawa is a Japanese American artist who works with wire, bending and crocheting it into beautiful forms inspired by nature. Born in Southern California in 1926, she has lived in San Francisco for almost 60 years and is considered to be a bay area gem, not only for her own work, but for her efforts as both art educator and arts education advocate. Just my kind of gal.

    I happened upon her work for the first time recently at the de Young Museum in San Francisco on my way to the elevator. It was presented less than ideally in this space between spaces. The work was good enough to have deserved better. Nevertheless, its power was such that it transcended the limitations of the strangely angled walls, errant signage, red fire alarm pulls, and sprinkler heads that interrupted almost every view of it. The wall texture was right at least—raw grey concrete which played to her rough and rusting wire forms. The lighting, too, was well considered and good, set to cast shadows that acted almost as ghost images to the work itself. I’m not sure what the museum’s architects Herzog and de Meuron were thinking, or perhaps they never knew that art would be hung here, but I digress.

    The strength of Asawa’s work for me was in its bare simplicity, never a  gesture more than absolutely necessary—functioning almost as sculpted sketches, line drawings in three dimensions. She accomplishes what sculptors all strive for but few achieve, the creation of negative forms that are as beautiful as the positive forms. Just look at the shadows her work makes on the wall to see what I mean next time you’re waiting for the de Young elevator to take you from the first floor to the second.