Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible

Born in rural California, American artist, educator, and arts advocate Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was first exposed to professional artists while her family and other Japanese Americans were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an incarceration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, eighteen months later, she enrolled in 1943 in Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa’s time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. She also met architectural student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949 and with whom she would raise a large family and build a career in San Francisco. Asawa continued to produce art steadily over the course of more than a half century, creating a cohesive body of sculptures and works on paper that, in their innovative use of material and form, deftly synthesizes a wide range of aesthetic preoccupations at the heart of twentieth-century abstraction. Makeda Best is a curator, writer, and historian of American photography. Since 2016, she has served as the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a MFA in studio photography from CalArts.Taylor Davis is a visual artist living in Boston. Davis has exhibited widely, with work included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Honors include a Rauschenberg Residency, a Radcliffe Fellowship, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the ICA Boston Foster Prize. Davis is a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and co-chair and faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.Ruth Erickson is the Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she has curated more than a dozen exhibitions, including solo projects with the artists Kevin Beasley, Mark Dion, Wangechi Mutu, Tschabalala Self, and Vivian Suter, as well as traveling group exhibitions on Black Mountain College. Briony Fer is an art historian who has written extensively on modern and contemporary art. Her research interests have consistently moved between the history of the avant-gardes and the work of contemporary artists, including Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, Vija Celmins, and Tacita Dean. She is a professor of the history of art at University College London and a fellow of the British Academy.Helen Molesworth is a Los Angeles–based writer and curator. She has organized monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Luc Tuymans among others. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.Jennifer L. Roberts is Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous books and essays, including Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Work and the Logic of Print (2012), and Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014). John Yau is an award-winning poet and art critic who has been publishing art criticism since 1978. He is a professor of critical studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. After writing for Art in America and Artforum, he served as the arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail from 2006 to 2011, and then began writing for Hyperallergic Weekend.