If you passed through the unlocked gate and rambling garden into Ruth Asawa’s Noe Valley home between 1966 and 2000, the 5-foot-tall Japanese American artist would likely have persuaded you to lie down on the kitchen table or living room floor and let her cover your face in plaster. Ethereal clusters of her undulating, looped-wire sculptures would have dangled from the rafters of the cathedral ceiling while her six children, and later 10 grandchildren, ran underfoot.
“Ruthie could get people to do very bizarre things — because to have your face cast is a completely intimate act,” said Addie Lanier, one of Asawa’s five surviving children. Addie’s son, Henry Weverka, who also had his hands and feet cast by his grandmother throughout childhood, and now oversees her estate, added, “She said she liked capturing a moment in time.”