Ruth Asawa rarely missed a chance to loop others into her work. At Black Mountain College, she would wake before dawn to rouse Josef Albers, the Bauhaus color theorist, so that they could watch the sun rise through the fog on the hills. At seventeen, in a Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas, she sketched caricatures of her fellow-detainees. Some of her signature wire sculptures—diaphanous, undulating forms, like chain-mail invertebrates—were made with the help of her sons and daughters. And in 1970, when she was commissioned to create a fountain for San Francisco’s Union Square, she enlisted schoolchildren from across the city in the design.
Ruth Asawa photographed by Imogen Cunningham. © Imogen Cunningham Trust