In 1943, when Ruth Asawa and her Japanese American family were interned at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, she had an advocate in her high school English teacher, Louise Beasley. Moved by her student’s drive and incessant desire to sketch and paint, Beasley encouraged the California native to continue her studies after graduating. Among the college catalogs the teacher offered was one from the Chicago Art Institute.

“I had never heard of an art institute,” Asawa later recalled. “The classes sounded exciting, but the tuition was beyond my reach.” So Asawa chose the school with the lowest fees she could find: Milwaukee State Teachers College, which charged $25 a semester.

Modest means weren’t about to keep the aspiring young artist down. After thriving in Milwaukee and then at the famed Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Asawa went on to forge a singular, seminal career as a San Francisco artist and arts education activist. Best known for her diaphanous, transportingly gorgeous hanging wire sculptures and exuberant figurative art fountains at Union Square and Ghirardelli Square, Asawa made an equally enduring contribution to art in the public schools.

A project that began at San Francisco’s Alvarado Elementary School in summer 1968 expanded citywide and grew across the curriculum, culminating in the creation of an arts-based public high school in 1982, fittingly renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. The city, thanks in large measure to Asawa’s determined labors, became a model for arts education around the country and beyond. Beasley’s faith in her student was abundantly affirmed.

Tempting as it is to view Asawa’s life as an artistic rags-to-riches parable, the story is far more shaded and nuanced. That rich narrative emerges in a scrupulously researched and lucidly written new book, “Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa,” by Marilyn Chase, published April 7 by Chronicle Books.

While it’s not surprising to learn that Asawa (1926-2013) encountered prejudice and condescension as a woman of Japanese extraction in mid-20th century America, her career was both unpredictably quixotic and solidly rooted in the artist’s essential nature.

Once she and her husband, architect Albert Lanier, had settled in San Francisco, the hard-working Asawa began turning out the distinctive wire pieces that attracted the attention of several museums, the Peridot Gallery in New York and critics. No less than the then-powerful Time magazine took notice in 1955.

In a review that paired the 28-year-old Asawa with the famed sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the magazine praised the “austerity and calm,” the “openness, delicacy and symmetry” of sculptures that suggested “blossoms, odorless, colorless, outsize, yet refreshing to contemplate.”

If the Time review seemed to patronize even as it praised, by describing Asawa as “a San Francisco housewife and mother of three,” the characterization probably didn’t much perturb the artist. In creating with Lanier a brood that eventually grew to six children (two of them adopted), Asawa valued family over fame, community over careerism, colleagues over self-promotion, and emphasized solidarity with friends.

After the Peridot first declined to exhibit her drawings and then proved unable to handle Asawa’s increasingly large hanging pieces under its 8-foot ceilings, the artist and the gallery parted ways in 1961. It would be the last time — until late in Asawa’s life, when Christie’s auction house sold some of her work for six-figure prices the artist had never dreamed of — that she would be represented in the art world capital of New York.

None of this should suggest that Asawa was either passive or unambitious. When it came time to do battle, she could suit up with the best of them. In one of the city’s most contentious public art commissions, Asawa held her ground over the design of “Andrea,” her 1968 fountain featuring a mermaid nursing a child, at Ghirardelli Square. Lawrence Halprin, the square’s noted landscape architect, vehemently objected, preferring an abstract, upthrust form for the fountain.

Chase recounts the Ghirardelli episode with both the wide-lens context of the combustive late 1960s and intimate particulars of an artist’s process. It was Asawa’s Noe Valley neighbor, Andrea Jepson, whose new mother’s body was coated in Vaseline and plaster to be cast for the sculpture. When maternal duty called, writes Chase, Asawa, a mother of six herself, was unfazed. “She simply removed the mold from Jepson’s torso and breasts so she could nurse.”

“Everything She Touched” is full of such resonant detail. This first comprehensive Asawa biography traces its subject from her childhood on a Norwalk (Los Angeles County) truck farm to old age, when the artist was hampered but unbowed by lupus and strokes. The internment camp years are vividly rendered. So is Asawa’s artistic flowering at Black Mountain, where she studied with abstract painter Josef Albers, who became a lifelong ally; took Merce Cunningham’s dance classes; befriended the inventor Buckminster Fuller; and supported herself by, among other things, milking cows and churning butter.

Asawa’s 1949 wedding to Lanier, a Caucasian Georgia native she had met at Black Mountain, took place in the couple’s San Francisco loft on Jackson Street, nine months after the California Supreme Court legalized intermarriage. Fuller designed the wedding ring.

Chase, a San Francisco journalist (who is a contributing writer for The Chronicle, among others) and teacher, spent 18 months combing through some 275 cartons of Asawa’s archival material housed at Stanford University. Scores of interviews with family members, artists and many others fleshed out the portrait.

“Ruth was very holistic,” Chase told The Chronicle. “She wanted no boundaries between her art and her life. It was all of a piece.”

In one delightful photograph taken by her famous friend Imogen Cunningham, Asawa sits cross-legged on the floor at work on one of her twisted wire pieces with four of her children gathered peacefully around her. Bare-bottomed baby Adam drinks from a bottle in the foreground. “She always wanted her children to see her work,” Chase said. Several of them became artists themselves.

Asawa’s life is the second deep dive Chase has made into a period of San Francisco history. In her first book, “The Barbary Plague” (2003), the author chronicled a 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague here that returned in 1907. The cautionary parallels to today’s coronavirus pandemic are unmistakable. Then as now, Chase said, denial, political delay and “the scapegoating of patients” exacerbated the crisis. “It’s strange to be introducing my new book with the first taking on this renewed relevance,” she said.

Happily, “Everything She Touched” arrives at a moment when Asawa seems to be enjoying what the author calls a “posthumous renaissance.” The U.S. Postal Service recently announced a forthcoming series of Asawa stamps depicting her sculptures. New York’s prestigious David Zwirner Gallery now represents her. Prices for her work continue to escalate, in some cases into millions of dollars.

Here in her spiritual home, the loveliest gathering of Asawa’s work, at the de Young Museum’s gallery at the base of the tower, is closed during the pandemic. But in the mind’s eye, the pieces go on shimmering in that space’s soft light, fragile yet sturdy as nature itself, the buoyant biomorphic forms casting cross-hatched shadows on walls and floors and on visitors stilled to silence in their presence.

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa

By Marilyn Chase

Chronicle Books; 224 pages; $29.95

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