How I didn't know -- but now I know -- Ruth Asawa
Introducing "Ruth Asawa, a Retrospective," currently at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through Feb 7, 2026.
by Hironori Funabiki, Professor at the Rockefeller University
Snapshot of “Ruth Asawa, a Retrospective” at MoMA. Image taken by author.
“I’m not so interested in the expression of something. I’m more interested in what the material can do. So that’s why I keep exploring.” — Ruth Asawa
In the era of information overload, and with AI models advising you on a variety of subjects, you may constantly find yourself wondering how to identify the “right” information effectively. Personally, I rather enjoy random coincidental encounters, in which I felt an “EN (縁),” an idea broadly appreciated in Japan. It means “bond” or “fate,” though I am afraid that the real sense of “EN” is lost in translation.
The book cover that drew the author in!
One of the recent memorable incidents that I felt an “EN” was my encounter of (or realization of) Ruth Asawa, a Japanese American artist. There were so many reasons why I should have known who she was, but I did not recognize her name until this April, when I picked up her biography at a bookstore in the South Street Seaport. After living in New York for more than 20 years, I have never visited the area, but a conversation during a party held for a small group of Japanese affiliated with the University [The Rockefeller University] persuaded me to visit. The South Street Seaport is not aligned to my taste, but while visiting I was allured to a bookstore, a kind of business that is threatened for extinction. On the first floor of McNally Jackson Books, my eyes were immediately drawn to a book with a cover showing a black and white photo of a young Asian woman holding a large sculpture of wire mesh. The book was “Everything She Touched: Life of Ruth Asawa” by Marilyn Chase. I quickly checked the Wikipedia page for Ruth Asawa on my phone and learned that she was a Japanese American artist born in California in 1926. She was later detained at an internment camp in Arkansas during World War II. The prologue opens with the story of one of Asawa’s sculptures selling for $1.4 million at Christie’s in 2013, just before she passed away at age 83. This information made me feel, in an arrogant way, “If I don’t buy this book now, who is going to buy this?” So I followed my habitual guidance, “When you wonder whether you should buy a book or not, buy it.”
Since I immigrated from Kyoto to San Francisco as a postdoctoral researcher in 1996, I read several books written by Japanese who traveled or lived in the US, including essays by Haruki Murakami (a novel writer, a writing fellow at Princeton, Tufts and Harvard) and Masahiko Fujiwara (a math professor, worked in University of Michigan and University of Colorado, Boulder). Reading essays on their own experiences greatly helped me navigate the cultural differences between the East and the West. However, since these authors eventually returned to Japan, they did not go through the process of assimilation or adaptation while maintaining their cultural origin in a foreign country. My reading list had never included books on the history of Japanese immigrants in the US until I picked one up at the Kinokuniya bookstore in Japantown, San Francisco. I was not exposed to this subject while I lived in Japan, but after I started my weekly “pilgrimage” to Japantown, I became interested in the paths that my predecessors had to pave.
Origami Fountain, Collection of the City and County of San Francisco. Image from San Francisco Arts Commission.
My first impression of Japantown in San Francisco was grey, artificial, and quiet. The main signatures of Japantown were the Japan Center Malls, which included the Japanese bookstore, and a concrete San Francisco Peace Pagoda. Frankly, the pagoda was depressing, since I was familiar with the authentic wooden pagodas in my hometown Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. The bland exterior of the mall did not give me a sense of living, in contrast to rather chaotic but colorful Chinatown, where Chinese decedents were highly visible on the streets. Only after I read about the history of Japanese immigrants in the US, I realized that the artificial impression of Japantown must have originated from World War II, when Japanese Americans from the West Coast had to abandon their homes as they were forced to migrate to the concentration/internment camps, later euphemized as relocation centers. However, the rebuilt Japantown functioned to support many descendants of Japan, and there I enjoyed Japanese books, videos, thinly sliced meats, sake, skillful Japanese barbers, and a cozy small restaurant where I could eat alone, the practice of which was common in Japan, but not in San Francisco. Eventually, I got to know family and friends of an elder Japanese immigrant widow, Ms. Yamamoto, who attended a temple in Japantown, leading me to volunteer at a cherry blossom festival held there. However, I did not notice that the Origami Fountains reinstalled in 1999 in Japantown were built by Ruth Asawa, who had strong influence in public art and art education in San Francisco. I also did not know that she designed and created fountains at Ghirardelli Square and Union Square. Most likely I saw and appreciated them, consciously or subconsciously, but the name of the artist did not settle in the memory of my brain.
Ruth Asawa’s “Mermaids” Fountain at Ghirardelli Square. Image from Flickr user Gary Stevens.
Like scientific discoveries, information only sparks in prepared minds. I was first intrigued by the role of artists in Japanese concentration camps thanks to another accidental intersection with Chiura Obata (1885-1975), a Japanese American artist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In December 2019, I traveled to Washington DC to attend an annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). Thanks to a timely message from Delta, notifying that my return flight was going to be delayed for hours, I decided to visit National Portrait Gallery, where I stepped into a special exhibition on Obata, “An American Modern.” I had no prior knowledge on Obata, but I immediately related myself to this artist from his arts capturing familiar sceneries from San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley, and Yosemite National Park. What I was struck most, however, was his artworks during his time at the internment camp at Tanforan, California, and then Topaz, Utah, where he founded and directed the art schools. Despite the hatred against Japanese Americans in the country, supporters existed to help them, including colleagues of Obata at UC Berkeley. This was the reason why I was intrigued by life of Ruth Asawa, who also had to be detained at internment camps during the war and then became a successful artist.
“New Moon” By Chiura Obata – Online Archive of California, Public Domain, Wikipedia Commons.
Although Ruth Asawa was not a student of Obata, the forced migration of Japanese Americans during the war triggered series of events that led her to become an artist. Ruth was born as the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant framers in 1926 in Norwalk, California. Ruth loved drawing and music, but she had limited free time outside of the schools as she had to engage a chore of farm work at home. Ironically, the forced relocation of the Asawa family gave free time to Ruth for drawing and opportunities for art education. While Ruth’s family had to live in the horse stable in the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, California, she had a chance to learn drawing and perspective from three professional artists, Tom Okamoto, Chris Ishii, and James Tanaka, who had worked for Disney Studios, but were sent to Santa Anita. In the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, her Caucasian teachers, Mabel Rose Jamison and Luise Beasly, offered art education including escorted field trips to sketch nature sceneries outside the camp. Through these experiences and advice from her mentors, Ruth was determined to be an art teacher and chose to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1943, where her life was bent for the second time.
Despite the affordable tuition at the Milwaukee State Teachers College and a scholarship received from the Quaker’s American Friends Service Committee, Ruth could not earn a degree to become an art teacher because no Wisconsin school would allof a Japanese-American to complete the required student-teaching practice. Encouraged and supported by her friends, Ruth joined Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1946, where she met two influential mentors Josef Albers, a Bauhaus artist who fled Germany, and the architect and designer Buckminister Fuller. In this school, Asawa also met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier. When her mentor Josef Albers took a sabbatical in Mexico, Ruth wanted to join him and found an opportunity arranged by American Friends Service Committee as a volunteer to teach art and English to children in rural small communities. While in Mexico, Ruth acquired a skill to create her signature wire mesh sculptures; in exchange to teach art to local children, the local schoolteacher taught Ruth a local method to weave baskets.
While I was learning the interesting life of Ruth Asawa from the book, I craved to see her works. In July, when I was strolling through the galleries at MoMA, taking an advantage of the University’s free cooperate membership, I unexpectedly encountered two pieces of her signature wire mesh sculptures in a special exhibition, “Woven Histories.”
Before you see something that you really wanted to see, you may become anxious, worrying if it would much the expectation. Perhaps because I did not expect to see her works in that exhibition, but my first in-person encounter to Ruth Asawa’s art evoked a pure sensation of joy. As the works hung from ceiling, their gentle movement and the mesh wires forming spherical shapes gave me sense of liberation from gravity. Their shadows, which were also slowly moving, provided additional dimensions and a sense of space. The spherical outlines, inspired from living forms in the nature, offered a sense of warmness. When I tried to focus on the individual mesh wires on the surface, my eyes were confused by the meshes on the back side, generating perceptional movements. They were hollow, but liquid-like. These series of sensations wouldn’t have been induced by a photo. You must see to experience them. These are the pieces of art that you wish to own and touch.
On the same day that I first saw Ruth Asawa’s works, I was delighted to learn about an exhibition starting in October at MoMA: “Ruth Asawa, a Retrospective,” which gave me a deadline to finish her biography. As I slowly made my way through the book, I learned more about her amazing life; her unwavering creative drive while raising six children (two of them were fostered children, whom Ruth and Albert adopted from others who could not care for them because of bias toward interracial marriage), her activism for public arts education, her commissioned fountains installed across San Francisco, and her long-standing collaborations with her family, friends, and mentors. Although I expected a story of a hidden Asian female artist, Asawa was not unknown. She was recognized by the New York art scene in 1950s. A documentary film, “Ruth Asawa: On Forms and Growth,“ was made in 1978. She served as a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco from 1989 to 1997. But she was forgotten outside of California, until 2009 when she was rediscovered by Jonathan Laib at Christie through an attempt by her son to make money for the care of Ruth, who was suffering from lupus. This contrasted to Yayoi Kusama (1929-), a Japanese female artist whose presence is now ubiquitous. I have been enjoying visiting art museums since my childhood, and lectures by Professor Yoshiaki Inui on European Art History at Kyoto University guided me how to enjoy arts through knowing the underlying contexts. I used to visit the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, which introduced me Anselm Kiefer, and since I moved to New York, it became my routine to see his monumental painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for some years. Wherever the cities I go, I visit museums. So, I had to ask myself, “Why didn’t I know Ruth Asawa, even though I lived in San Francisco while she was alive there?”
On October 18th, 2025, I went to the member previews of “Ruth Asawa, a Retrospective” at MoMA. From the biography, I learned that Ruth wanted to exhibit her drawings along with her signature sculptures at galleries, but this rarely happened. In this exhibition, dedicating the entire 6th floor, a plenty of space was allocated to all aspects of her artistic life. As a life scientist who had to chase for research fundings, I could relate my efforts with her denied applications for Guggenheim Fellowship even with a strong recommendation letter from her mentor Josef Albers. I read that Ruth made live masks of her family and friends and displayed them at her home/studio in San Francisco. Seeing them along with a large wooden door that she designed gave me a sense of her active engagement with people. As I read several episodes on her exchanging crafted gifts with her mentors, her wedding ring designed by Buckminister Fuller, and a drawing by Josef Albers in the same room made me feel as if I observed their conversations. Many pieces of drawing on plants and flowers gave me an additional perspective on how diverse forms of lives influenced her abstract arts. In fact, as a cell biologist, I could not help but find cells with the nucleus in her mesh wire sculptures that include internal spheres. One of her works looked like a colony of budding yeasts, popular model organisms in my research field. Extracting morphological features of lives that survived natural selections of evolution, she successfully provided artificial metal wires with virtual warmness and movement. My viewpoints must have been also influenced by my previous exposures to Japanese designs, such as zen gardens, pottery, and flower arrangement, which attempted to recapitulate dynamic natures with limited materials. Now, works by Asawa hit my inner space through multiple channels.
Stereo pair images of the yeast actin cytoskeleton through the cell cycle, https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.9.12.3259
Theodosius Dobzhansky stated, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” While research in handful model organisms in last >50 years greatly helped understand the basic mechanisms of living systems and human diseases, we have dug just the surface of vast possibilities that the evolution can accomplish. All the living forms seen on the earth are outcomes of many coincidental events. Natural selections of evolutionary processes may act brutally on individuals but resulted in amazing variations and capacities of the living systems. We also know that a disaster for some can be an opportunity for others. For Ruth Asawa, the disruptive events triggered by the war offered her a series of personal collisions to become a successful artist. However, these may not have been pure coincidental events but her character, who cared more on what she can offer to others than what she could gain, attracted people who were willing to collaborate with her. Although she said that she was not interested in the expression of something, she did know that art projects would provide children with opportunities for self-expression through discovering what the material can do. Her life story and arts reminded me why I wanted to be a biology researcher. I’m interested in what the evolution can do, including how the living systems can even navigate the coincidences. So that’s why I keep exploring.
References
Marilyn Chase, “Everything She Touched: Life of Ruth Asawa” (2020, 2025) Chronicle Books
“Ruth Asawa, A Retrospective homepage hosted by MoMA
Ruth Asawa, A Working Life, Google Arts & Culture