Art Lovers discussion

How Ruth Asawa’s Pioneering Sculptures Ended Up on U.S. Stamps
by Claire Selvin
August 21, 2020


Ruth Asawa Forever® Stamps, 2020.

Earlier this month, the United States Post Office issued new stamps featuring artist and educator Ruth Asawa’s airy wire sculptures. Whether because of a new amount of attention being directed at the USPS in light of current events or a revival in interest in Asawa (the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis recently held a major show of her work, and Modern Art Oxford in the U.K. has a forthcoming survey), the stamps have been a hit, both within the art world and beyond. On the occasion of the stamps’ release, ARTnews looked back on the artist’s life and career, from her years at Black Mountain College to some of her public projects and educational initiatives in San Francisco. Below is a guide to major events from Asawa’s childhood and milestones in her practice.

From an early age, Asawa was creating artworks.

Born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, Asawa was the fourth of seven children in her family. Her parents were Umakichi and Haru Asawa, who immigrated to America from Japan and worked as truck farmers. Discriminatory laws prohibited Asawa’s parents from owning land of their own in California or becoming American citizens. Asawa took jobs on farms before and after school, during which she would create sketches and drawings. She once said, “I used to sit on the back of the horse-drawn leveler with my bare feet drawing forms in the sand, which later in life became the bulk of my sculptures.”


Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.077, Hanging Miniature Seven-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1978.

Asawa and her family are detained in internment camps in the U.S. during the 1940s.

In 1942, Asawa’s father was arrested and interned in a camp in New Mexico, while she and the rest of her family was detained in Santa Anita, California. The artist and her family would be released from an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, in 1943, when she enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College. There, she experienced racism and xenophobia, which ultimately caused her to leave school in 1946 without her degree—the school had refused to place her in a teaching position, which was required to graduate. Asawa subsequently moved to North Carolina to study at Black Mountain College, which was founded in 1933 as a bastion of the avant-garde and had served as a refuge for some artists who fled Nazi Germany and war in Europe.


Ruth Asawa, Untitled (BMC.95, In and Out), ca. 1946-49.

The artist developed her practice during her time at Black Mountain College.

Asawa worked closely with her instructors—among them artist
Josef Albers (who was the first art teacher to be hired at the institution), designer Buckminster Fuller, dancer Merce Cunningham, and mathematician Max Dehn—at Black Mountain College, and she met architecture student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949. An early painting by Asawa, Untitled (BMC.95, In and Out), ca. 1946–49, hints at the rhythmic geometry that would come to define her sculptural practice. The work features abstract, arrow-shaped forms that seem to dance across the red canvas in an inexorable, linear choreography. (above)


Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.459, Hanging Open Form with a Disc, Four Upward Ears, and Four Downward Tails), ca. 1950-59.

Asawa begins showing her work publicly following her move to San Francisco.

Together with Lanier, Asawa moved to San Francisco in 1949, where the couple went on to have six children in the following nine years. It was during this period that the artist started exhibiting her famed hanging wire sculptures at venues including Peridot Gallery in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Oakland Art Museum, and elsewhere. Asawa also presented work at the 1955 Bienal de São Paulo. Of her first sculptural experimentations, which often feature buoyant forms that can cast undulating shadows, the artist once said, “My curiosity was aroused by the idea of giving structural form to the images in my drawings. These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”


Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.452, Hanging Tied-Wire, Five-Branched Form Based on Nature), ca. 1965.

In the 1960s, her sculptures become increasingly intricate.

Inspired by a plant she found in California’s Death Valley, Asawa began creating tied wire sculptures in the 1960s. These works, which now rank among her most famous ones, feature star-shaped centers surrounded by outstretched sinuous branches. In 1965, curator Walter Hopps, formerly of Ferus Gallery fame, organized a solo show of Asawa’s sculptures and drawings at California’s Pasadena Art Museum, which is now known the Norton Simon. It was during this decade that the artist also began taking on public commissions in San Francisco, starting with her sculptures of nursing mermaids in a fountain in the city’s Ghirardelli Square. She joined the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1968 and with architectural historian Sally Woodbridge she cofounded the Alvarado School Art Workshop, which would later become the San Francisco Arts Education Project and worked to bring arts education to schools in San Francisco.



Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.066, Hanging Mobius Strip), ca. 1968.

Asawa focuses on arts education opportunities for students in San Francisco.

In 1982, the artist’s efforts to establish a public high school dedicated to the arts were realized with the opening of the School of the Arts. The audition-based was renamed the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in 2010, and it now serves as a space where “promising young artists and thinkers collaborate with teachers, professional artists, and their community to explore and develop their personal identity through art, insight, and movements that reflect and influence the world around them,” according to its website. (https://www.sfusd.edu/school/ruth-asa...


Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1992.

In the early millennium, she takes on a large-scale public project and receives a major retrospective.

The last public commission of Asawa’s career was the Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University, for which the artist designed a memorial to recognize Japanese Americans interned during World War II, including the 19 SFSU students who were forced to withdraw from the institution in 1942 and detained in internment camps. “I thought it would be nice if we could do something that told the story but not in a bitter way and not just as a Japanese story,” Asawa said of the project, which was unveiled in 2002. “This is a story about liberty and freedom.” Asawa placed 10 boulders symbolizing American internment camps in the garden, and a bronze marker in the space honors the families of SFSU students interned. In 2006, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco presented a retrospective of her work, titled “Contours in the Air” and featuring 54 sculptures and 45 works on paper.

Today, Asawa is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th-century.

Asawa died in 2013, but her monumental legacy lives on in the art world. Her iconic works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum, both in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the de Young Museum in San Francisco; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; and more institutions. The artist’s estate has been represented by David Zwirner, one of the world’s biggest galleries, since 2017, and in 2018 the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis opened “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work,” the first major museum show of her work in over a 10 years. In 2020, Christie’s sold her 1953–54 sculpture Untitled (S.401, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Continuous Interlocking Form, with Spheres within Two Lobes) for $5.38 million, and David Zwirner presented an exhibition of her work at its London space. Modern Art Oxford in the United Kingdom will open the exhibition “Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe” in January 2021 before it travels to the Stavanger Art Museum in Norway.

https://www.artnews.com/feature/ruth-...

Heather, thanks for sharing the information about Ruth Asawa. Her work--and the postage stamps--are beautiful!

Sure, Connie! I’m glad you liked it.
I love the stamps. I’m going to see if I can find them at a post office around me. The normal one I go to doesn’t have them but I’ll check around.
I’m glad an artist, is being shown in public, as on a federal stamp. I’m happy she got that recognition.

I love her work!

Ruth wrote: "I love her work!"

I have to admit that I didn't know who she was, or about her work until she was recognized on the postage stamps. My aunt who lives in Los Angeles and is very into art and humanities, told me about the stamps even before I found this article.

I have never been so excited to buy stamps! I'm so glad she's finally getting the recognition she deserves between this and the Google doodle a few years back.

Philip wrote: "I have never been so excited to buy stamps! I'm so glad she's finally getting the recognition she deserves between this and the Google doodle a few years back."

I went to the post office the other day specifically to see if I could find them. They didn't have them and neither did the other post office near me.. Hmmm I really would like to get these, also!

I had to order mine through the USPS website.

https://store.usps.com/store/product/...

Philip wrote: "I had to order mine through the USPS website.

https://store.usps.com/store/product/..."

Good to know, Philip! And thank you for the link, I'm going to order mine today! I really want those stamps and I've been going to different post offices around here.
Do you have to pay some sort of shipping and handling fee? I'm mean they're no bigger than an envelope...

I went to my post office today and asked again per chance, if they had these stamps and they did! I bought the whole sheet. :)

Ruth Asawa: The Making of a Forever Stamp \
How Ruth Asawa's postage stamps, designed by Ethel Kessler, became the most beloved of the year.


The Ruth Asawa Forever Stamps designed by Ethel Kessler. © 2020 U.S. Postal Service.

https://www.phillips.com/article/6595...

Last April, when the United States Postal Service (USPS) unveiled their upcoming forever stamps, the section of the Internet that includes curators, writers, and artists erupted in enthusiasm. The stamps honored artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), who, in the past few years, has finally received international recognition for her remarkable wire sculptures. The resulting posts fell somewhere between “these are so wonderful” and “I love Ruth Asawa.” Both the stamps and the artist had cued a seemingly universal outpouring of appreciation.

Although the effusions seemed to come all at once, the Ruth Asawa forever stamps—revealed in April and issued in August—had been in the works for years by the time they reached our post offices and social media feeds. As Ethel Kessler, the designer of the Asawa stamp and an art director at USPS explains, “All these things, they just take much longer than anybody can imagine.”

It’s a very challenging medium, to work in miniature. –Ethel Kessler

Every year, USPS receives about 30,000 suggestions from the general public for people, places, and things that should be stamps. The final twenty-five or so will meet the qualifying criteria determined by the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee. US postage stamps must, for example, focus on “American or American-related subjects” and “honor extraordinary or enduring contributions to American society, history, culture or environment.” One of USPS’ most important eligibility requirements, which is not true for all countries, is that living people will not be considered, making each stamp a legacy.

When Asawa’s name came up, “it seemed like it was a great idea,” Kessler says. “She was a great subject, with an amazing history.” But even if the recommendation is excellent, the designers need to consider what will work well at stamp-size. Sometimes they make a recommendation. And one of us says, ‘that would make a great movie, but I don’t think that’s going to make a great stamp,’” shares Kessler, who has been working on stamps since 1996. “You have to isolate it down into its simplest, simplest form. It’s a very challenging medium, to work in miniature.”

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.045, Hanging Five-Lobed, Multilayered Continuous Form within a Form, with Spheres in the First, Second and Third Lobes ), circa early 1960s, copper and brass wire, 72 x 14 x 14 in. (182.88 x 35.56 x 35.56 cm). Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York

Once the subject is selected, the stamps are assigned to one of the four art directors. Each art director has a particular area of interest, Kessler’s being art, culture, flowers, and gardens. When Kessler was assigned Ruth Asawa as subject, she began researching Asawa and visiting galleries, to get a sense of her background and approach. “It could be that it’s about a writer and that I haven’t read anything by that writer,” she explains. “In order to choose the visual direction, you have to know what their style is like.”

One of the challenges of translating’s Asawa’s work to stamp-size was how ethereal, transparent, spatial, and three-dimensional her oeuvre is. Kessler describes trying to balance Asawa’s two-dimensional and three-dimensional works and eventually deciding that they “rejected each other,” as the two-dimensional works interrupted the multidimensional planes of Asawa’s sculpture

[Stamps] tell America's story to the world. –Ethel Kessler

Ultimately, Kessler selected ten photographs of Asawa’s sculptures, nine of which were taken by Larry Cuneo, who is married to one of Asawa’s daughters, Aiko, also an artist. The pair met while at the Pratt Institute and when they settled in San Francisco, they often visited Ruth Asawa’s home. Cuneo describes Asawa’s house as a “bustle of activity.” “I quickly learned that everyone pitched in, so I did my part by documenting the activities,” he wrote over email.

By the time Cuneo was contacted, he says, “there had been several meetings regarding design ideas, sculpture choices, image availability, copyright permissions, etc. But, wow, I thought; how nice to even be considered for the project?” The images taken by Cuneo and selected by Kessler show Asawa’s sculptures against white backdrops where they cast subtle shadows. Cuneo writes that for these shots, with their minimal background and indirect light, “simple is better.” He adds his compliments to Kessler, “The inclusion of both tight crops and full sculptures is so smart, as are the typeface and the subtle tonal adjustments of the backgrounds.”

The Ruth Asawa Forever Stamps designed by Ethel Kessler. © 2020 U.S. Postal Service.

In their final form, the stamps float within their small crenellated frames, each line and loop is distinct, the range of colors clearly visible. Some of the stamps feature multiple works, creating a constellation of overlapping forms. On the selvedge, there is a portrait of Asawa at work, taken in 1954 for Life magazine; she knowingly glances back.

Kessler thinks the stamps resonated so widely and deeply because, as Paul Ha, Director of MIT List, said to her, Asawa is "an artist's artist." Asawa's work, she explains, is very contemporary, "it's a unique category all her own. It's out of the normal mainstream of painting and sculpture." And almost like a two-dimensional, portable exhibition, the forever stamps—a form of public art—announce this unique contribution to art history.

Yet these distributable, national objects are also intensely personal, individually peeled off and applied to birthday cards, announcements, and thank yous. And Asawa's story will continue beyond that final envelope application. “It's amazing,” reflects Cuneo, “to think that this morning a child, thousands of miles away, is fetching the mail and may be inspired to make a drawing or a sculpture.”