Review: Everything She Touched
Marilyn Chase’s Everything She Touched (2020) is the first comprehensive biography of Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). In 13 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue, Chase writes Asawa as an artist who sought to fully integrate art and life. We see her weaving and working surrounded by her children, the portraits and casts she did of everyone in her life, the letters she exchanged with her soon-to-be-husband about how loving her required loving her work. We follow her effort to build a public art education led by artists and crafters in her home city, San Francisco. And we are inviting to reflect on how to find a way to continue making art, exemplified by how she used baker’s clay in her public sculptures (then casted in bronze) to safely collaborate with children.
“bore the efforts of children and friends of Asawa's, including leaves fashioned by Ruth's mother, Haru Asawa.”
Bringing together art and life is only one lens to read this book, inspired by the context in which we write this review: the monthly MAD meetups. Another would be the structural barriers of racism and exoticism, not to mention sexism, that she struggled with her whole life despite resounding early successes. The thread runs through the book, from the stories of her family’s internment during World Ward II, the disapproval of her inter-racial marriage (which had just been legalized in 1949), and to the response at her sculpture of a nursing mermaid for one of her famous fountains. Modern representations of breastfeeding have become far more common and accepted; less so is her embrace of a wide range of techniques, materials and themes, art for the everyday and the gallery, held together by what sounds like relentless labor and very little sleep.
A delicate balance between art and design underpins her work. Her early basket sculptures found success as interior design objects, and she resisted going down that path. Her collaboration with the Peridot Gallery in New York stopped as her sculptures became too monumental for its 8 feet ceilings - and one can only suppose this echoes her misgivings about her work being treated as (only) decorative. She used traditional crafts techniques, pushed ever further. Her collaborative bas-reliefs evoke folk art patterns and themes far from the abstract work she is best known for.
The book grounds her approach in her experience of post-WW2 Black Mountain College, and by extension the Bauhaus. It induced a necessary economy of means, and introduced the search for an art getting to the nature of human movement and perception, and for a design adapted to modern manufacturing processes, yet fascinated by folk crafts. It further gave her lifelong mentors and friends, most notably Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes and the Albers with their work on colors and revalorizing traditional crafts.
A significant portion of the book is dedicated to her efforts in developing a public art education in the Bay Area, especially for children. She started with enlisting her friends to teach workshops at the local school, and built a movement, fighting for financial and political support at the local and state level. We might take this for granted, but interest in enabling art by children was nascent in the 1960s. That decade saw Rhoda Kellogg, a fellow San Franciscan, first outlining a theory of the development of children drawing skills.
Returning to Asawa’s body of work, it is finally embraced in its totality - with recent exhibitions focusing not just on her baskets but also on her everyday daily practice, or the impact of origami on her sculptures. She is posthumously recognized as a core historical figure, though her fight for a public art education is far from over.
