WHY, OH WHY – I DECRY!
Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was an extraordinary metal wire artist. She took the craft of wire metal looping to never before seen sculptural heights.
Ruth Asawa’s metal wire hangings
Ruth Asawa at work
Soon after her death in 2013 her daughters were interested in outreach and commodifying their mother’s work in ways that would be beneficial to advancing the craft.
Ruth Asawa’s daughter shown giving a workshop in the San Francisco Bay area on wire coiling and sharing their mother’s technique that she learned during her visit to Mexico.
Her daughters giving workshops and lessons in their mother’s Mexican Toluca origins of knotting wire might have been a natural extension of themselves.
Mexico is where and how Ruth Asawa says she learned her metal wire crafting during a brief trip to Mexico. It was during this trip to Mexico that she was encouraged to enroll at Black Mountain College. Many students and faculty from Black Mountain would go on to become a who’s who list of prestigious names in the Art World.
Her children seem to have grown up around their mother’s prolific works and even seem to have become an integral part of its workings.
Notice the elegant start the Mexicans gave to their metal wire baskets.
An elegant start to finish - Mexican Toluca Baskets
These are Toluca metal wire baskets that I pulled off the internet 2016, now nowhere to be found.
The NEW YORKER Magazine September 29, 2017 Ruth Asawa Reshapes Art History
“She hit on her singular process in 1947, at the age of twenty-one, while on a visit to Mexico, where she saw baskets in the process of being made.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/ruth-asawa-reshapes-art-history
Ruth Asawa wire coil Basket 1946-48 (l). She expands and explores her development to find her own voice (r).
With Asawa’s most recent fame, this information of its origins in Mexico seems to have been completely obliterated from the Internet. I have only a scant few saved images of this antecedent craft that I saved around the time I found Asawa’s work so compelling. I was experimenting with crocheting and knitting with thin wire to shape into products so this technique spoke to me as a crafts person who started this work in Japan decades earlier.
Asawa takes the craft a step further to bring it into an art endeavor by moving the crocheted pieces in different directions, sizes and shapes, even inside-out without a seemingly practical purpose.
Why then would anyone feel the need to obliterate it’s noble origins? Do her dealers think that, by eradicating the true origin of her sculpture and her own statements about how her trip to Mexico being life-changing that this would keep her prices skyrocketing?
Or might it in reverse, heaven forbid, bring up the price of the Toluca baskets? Does eradicating Toluca baskets off the internet possibly lessen the possibility that others would easily find the origins of her work?
Whatever the reason, writers presently are vehemently discounting the association of Mexican origins to Asawa’s art. To add insult to injury a writer/artist on her blog site asks where are all the Toluca baskets, if in fact Asawa was inspired by them? They are gone, wiped from the internet, except wait - I screenshot and copied them in 2016. By the time I went back to look for them again in 2018 they were gone. Now only colorful wooden coil baskets exist on the internet to describe Toluca baskets. Tsk tsk. Anything that looks like the original Toluca baskets, when goggled are ALL presently attributed to Asawa. What?!
https://www.elainelutherart.com/ruth-asawa-and-the-mythical-basketmaker-of-mexico/
In an ironic turn aroud, Ruth Asawa gets obliterated in a similar way when Kusama makes no mention of Asawa’s artwork as precedent for her own. She rather states her inspiration for her circles from her family’s garden. Here is an image of Asawa’s art work while living in Washington State. Coincidentally, Kusama took a trip there during that time.
Asawa early 50’s from Book: ruth asana line by line
Ruth Asawa’s Painting become Kusama’s Dots
Will we ever learn origin has significance? All else is playing hide-and-seek to dup the innocent bystander. Not only denying a person to know the true origin, but in the case of Asawa’s work, denying a culture as rich in history and innovation as Mexico by wiping out its inspiring past.
Does this denial of the truth give US in the U.S. a greater sense of importance?