“A large retrospective only scratches the surface of Asawa’s contribution.”–Philip Kennicott
December 2025
In 1946, frustrated by the racism she experienced as she sought to become a teacher, artist Ruth Asawa enrolled at Black Mountain College, a cauldron of creativity that attracted some of the most prestigious teachers and precocious students in the 1930s and ’40s. Asawa was born to Japanese immigrant parents and after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, she was incarcerated along with her family at a prison camp in Arkansas. Even after the war, anti-Japanese sentiment precluded placement as a teacher, so she began her career as an artist, studying with the theorist and painter Josef Albers, architect and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
