Ruth Asawa

Ruth Aiko Asawa (1926 to 2013) was an American modernist artist primarily known for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms, alongside figurative and abstract drawings and prints. Born in California to Japanese immigrant parents and interned with her family during the Second World War, she studied at Black Mountain College under the Bauhaus painter and color theorist Josef Albers and the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, and learned the knitted-wire loop technique that became her signature medium from a Mexican teacher on a 1947 trip to Mexico. She achieved commercial and critical success by the early 1960s and became a prominent advocate for public art, and was the driving force behind the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, later renamed in her honor.