‘In the Shadow of Ruth Asawa’ by Lisa Yin Zhang
October 2025
I’ve been thinking about Ruth Asawa’s shadows. They’re surprising, not shaped how you might expect: While one of her sinuous hanging basket sculptures might be elongated, with an oblong head and abdominal segments, for instance, its shadow might have a round belly and a shortened neck — another character entirely. Shadows aren’t an afterthought in Asawa’s work, but another dimension of it — another way in which one thing can contain or serialize into an infinity. What plenitude; what a rich, generous world.
