Untitled (S.464)
c. 1963
20th C.
North America, U.S.A., California
15 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 15 1/2 in. (39.4 x 39.4 x 39.4 cm)
By (primary)
Ruth Asawa
American, 1926–2013
Object Type:
Metalwork
Medium:
Copper or bronze wire
Credit Line:
Gift of Carol and Dexter Hake
Accession Number:
2014.110
Object Label
Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, PhD, Assistant Curator of American Art, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University:
Ruth Asawa graduated from high school inside the wire fences of Rohwer Internment Camp in 1943. Freed by the government only for educational purposes, Asawa made her way to Black Mountain College, an experimental school near Asheville, North Carolina. During a school field trip to Mexico, the artist learned a wire-crocheting technique that would become the heart of her practice: large-scale sculptures suspended from the ceiling and made of crocheted-wire mesh. In 1961, when friends brought Asawa an arboreal desert plant from Death Valley, the artist represented it by bundling copper wire together into a “trunk” and then forking off thinner bundles into “branches.” Like her wiremesh sculptures, which are reminiscent of dividing cells, Untitled retains her signature biomorphism.
Copyright
© 2022 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Provenance
Carol and Dexter Hake, Los Altos Hills, CA; given to the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2014.
Bibliography
Daniell Cornell, "The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air" (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, University of California Press, 2006); Sydney Skelton Simon, "Working Metal in 20th-Century Sculpture" (Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, 2018). Fig. 11, pg. 19, and front and back covers, repr.
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