Following Nature: Ruth Asawa in Sonoma County
Jan 26 - Apr 20, 2008
The Sonoma County museum is delighted to present for the first time in the Museum’s history, drawings, paintings, and sculpture by one of America’s most important women artists of the twentieth century, Ruth Asawa. Like many artists over the last century who have sought refuge in Sonoma County for inspiration, Asawa spent over thirty years observing nature and immersing herself in organic forms along the Russian River near Armstrong Woods.
Asawa's artwork has been collected by such important institutions as: Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum among many others. Her contributions to the modern art movement, which she has actively participated in since the 1950s, are substantial. A Japanese American, who spent eighteen months in internment camps at a young age, she went on to attend Black Mountain College, the famous experimental art school in North Carolina, where she was immersed in the avant-garde.
The Museum would especially like to thank Paul (Asawa) Lanier and his family who graciously loaned their private collection for this exhibition. Paul is the youngest son of Ruth Asawa and Albert Lainer; a gifted artist in his own right who was a ceramics student of Marguerite Wildenhain’s at Pond Farm.
This family legacy exhibition, Following Nature, furthers the Museum's focus of Where Land Meets Art.
Artist Bio:
Born Ruth Aiko Asawa on January 24, 1926 in Norwalk, a farming community in Southern California, Asawa was the fourth of seven children of immigrant parents from Japan who made their living as truck farmers growing seasonal crops – strawberries, carrots, green onions, tomatoes. After WWII broke out, Asawa was interned first at a temporary camp at Santa Anita Race Track, and then six months later shipped by train to a camp in Rohwer, Arkansas where she attended high school. She attended Milwaulkee State Teachers College and later decided to follow her passion for art, attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Asawa met her husband, an architecture and design student, Albert Lanier, while attending Black Mountain College. They moved to San Francisco in 1949 where they were married and still reside today. Asawa later received honorary degrees from Milwaukee State Teachers College, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco State University when she was in her 70s.
