California sculptor Ruth Asawa dies

Ruth Asawa gets a honary doctorate from San Francisco State in 2002 during the dedication of a memorial garden at San Francisco State honoring Japanese American students that were interned during World War 2. Ruth Asawa gets a honary doctorate from San Francisco State in 2002 during the dedication of a memorial garden at San Francisco State honoring Japanese American students that were interned during World War 2. Photo: John Storey, SFC Photo: John Storey, SFC Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close California sculptor Ruth Asawa dies 1 / 42 Back to Gallery

Ruth Asawa, one of California's most admired sculptors and the first Asian American woman in the nation to achieve recognition in a male-dominated discipline, died Monday night of natural causes at her home in San Francisco. She was 87.

Ms. Asawa's name perhaps will serve as a reminder of the importance of preserving artwork. This year, a proposed Apple Store threatened her early 1970s "Hyatt on Union Square Fountain," on steps between the Hyatt Hotel and a now-closed, adjacent Levi's store.

After furious public protest, the city rejected Apple's plans and told the company to redo them to ensure that the fountain sculpture survives.

Ms. Asawa's other notable public work includes the "Japanese American Internment Memorial" in San Jose and the "Andrea Mermaid Fountain" at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. In addition, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, which honored Ms. Asawa with a career retrospective in 2006-07, has dedicated the ground-floor lobby area of its tower to ongoing display of her work.

"Ruth Asawa will be remembered for the extraordinary wire sculptures that so beautifully interweave nature and culture," said Timothy Burgard, curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He characterized her "as a pioneering post-World War II modernist whose works have transcended the multiple barriers she faced as an Asian American woman artist working with traditional 'craft' materials and techniques. She lived to see all of these confining categories challenged and redefined."

Signature works

Ms. Asawa's signature works consist of lattices or dendrites of woven or entwined wire, defining volumes almost without mass. Her bronzes take the more robust form of human figures and other images modeled in relief or in the round. Ms. Asawa's place in the history of modern art in California is secure, but the wider art world has been slower to acknowledge it.

That changed abruptly this spring when Christie's auction house in New York presented a sensitively installed exhibition of her wire works, preceding an auction in which a particularly elegant and complex 1960s hanging sculpture by her sold for more than $1.4 million.

In 1982, Ms. Asawa was a founder of what is now called the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, a San Francisco Unified School District arts high school, which is slated for relocation to the Civic Center arts district. Her prestige bolstered successful efforts on the part of the San Francisco Unified School District to retain arts programs when so many other districts eliminated theirs.

Citizenship restriction

Born Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk (Los Angeles County), Ms. Asawa was the fourth among seven children of immigrant truck farmers whom state law then prohibited from owning land or applying for citizenship.

During childhood, Ms. Asawa did farm work with her family and attended both public school and a "Japanese cultural school," where she learned calligraphy and her parents' native language. Her teachers appreciated her drawing ability.

In 1942, the federal government began to implement the executive order mandating internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Ms. Asawa's father was separated for six years from the rest of her family, who were housed initially in the Santa Anita racetrack stables, and eventually at an internment camp in Rohwer, Ark.

Art studies

Ms. Asawa continued drawing and learned as she could from older internee artists. She completed high school in the camp and won a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College.

Because of anti-Japanese prejudice, Ms. Asawa was unable to obtain mandatory teaching credentials. She instead entered Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an educational experiment that in its brief life span became a hotbed of artistic innovation. It attracted future luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Bauhaus exile Josef Albers who, improbably, acted as Ms. Asawa's mentor.

Ms. Asawa left Black Mountain after three years, emboldened to devote her life to art. She had met there, and soon married, architect and designer Albert Lanier (1927-2008), with whom she had six children.

Ms. Asawa served on the San Francisco Arts Commission and on the board of trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She received honorary doctorates from San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts.

"Generations of San Franciscans experienced firsthand her personal commitment to working communally to create public art projects," Burgard said, "as well as her passionate public advocacy of art education as a transformative and empowering experience, especially for children."

Ms. Asawa is survived by her children, Xavier Lanier, Aiko Lanier, Hudson Lanier, Paul Lanier and Addie Lanier. Her son Adam Lanier predeceased her.