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This is the Part II of life and career of Ruth Asawa.

Asawa and her husband and life-long partner, Albert Lanier, had six children. A close friend and photographer, Imogen Cunningham, often captured Asawa working alongside her children in her home. One of Asawa’s daughters, Aiko said, “We always saw her making art, it was part of her everyday existence. I never thought of her making art as a separate activity. To us, she wasn’t working. We didn’t have to be quiet so she could concentrate. Her artmaking space was always in our house…”

Asawa was a strong advocate for social change and devoted much of her time and energy toward art education in her community in San Francisco. Asawa and her friend, Sally Woodbridge, founded The Alvarado School Arts Workshop, an innovative art program that involved parents and professional artists in public schools.

Asawa’s vision was strongly influenced by her own experience at the Black Mountain College, and she believed that it was important for young students to work directly with professional artists. Asawa served on the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and become a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In 1982, she was instrumental in founding a public arts high school, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010.

“Learn something. Apply it. Pass it on so it is not forgotten.”- Ruth Asawa. (Summarized from Ruth Asawa’s website.)

Asawa used metal wires to weave her own stories into her art, and she did so with great curiosity throughout her entire life. Her wire sculptures are intricate and strong, complex and simple, all at the same time. Awasa wove her art intimately into a life rich with family and community, and her life in turn was intertwined with her art—they were inseparable.

Image 1: Front cover

Image 2: Ruth Asawa and her children at home on Saturn Street, San Francisco, 1957, Imogen Cunningham

Ruth Asawa : life's work Edited by Tamara H. Schenkenberg; essays by Aruna D'Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg. St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2019 HOLLIS number: 99153758428703941

Today, the images of Ruth Asawa’s (1926–2003) beautiful metal hanging sculptures can be found on the United States Postal stamps and her work is gaining international recognition. Yet, little is known about her life and career. Certainly, her career would have been very different if she had completed the student teaching requirement for her teaching degree at the Milwaukee State Teachers College. But she was advised against it because of anti-Japanese sentiment after World War II.  Unable to complete her degree, Asawa left Wisconsin to join Black Mountain College, a progressive art college founded in 1933 in North Carolina. Ultimately, her experience there changed her life and career as an artist. Her teachers at the Black Mountain College included Joseph Albers, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller, and she also met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier.

Asawa was born on January 24, 1926 in Norwalk, California to Umakichi and Haru Asawa, Japanese immigrants who worked as truck farmers. In February 1942, a couple of months after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Asawa’s father was arrested by the FBI and sent to New Mexico. In April of the same year, Asawa, her mother, and five of her siblings were ordered to relocate to the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, CA, and then forcibly moved again to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas where they stayed until September 1943. She would not see her father again until 1948. In total, Asawa spent eighteen months in internment camps before enrolling at the Milwaukee State Teachers College with a scholarship. (Summarized from Ruth Asawa and website.)

Stay tuned for the Part II of life and career of Ruth Asawa.

Image 1: US Postal stamps Image 2: Front cover Image 3: Installation view at David Zwirner, 2017

Ruth Asawa New York, NY: David Zwirner Books, ARTBOOK/D.A.P. [2018] Catalog of the exhibition held at David Zwirner, New York, September 13-October 21, 2017. Exhibition, “Ruth Asawa” HOLLIS number: 99153719112003941

Hung Liu is a Chinese-American artist, born in Changchun, China in 1948. Liu grew up during the Maoist regime and was trained in the Socialist Realist style. As a young woman, Liu labored in remote fields far away from her home for several years during the Cultural Revolution.

Liu is known for her paintings based on historical Chinese photographs. She studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before emigrating to the United States in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego. Liu’s paintings incorporate images of historical documents and photographs, often accompanied by washes and drips of paint. They reveal, but also conceal, personal and cultural narratives.

In a painting entitled Resident Alien (1988) Liu painted an image almost identical to her own green card, but at a much larger scale of 5 feet high and 7 feet wide. Viewers soon realize that the legal name of the card holder is “Fortune Cookie,” a free dessert given to diners at the conclusion of meals at Chinese restaurants in the United States. Liu investigated the origin of the fortune cookie and discovered that it originated in a Japanese tea house near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. By referring herself as “Fortune Cookie” on a green card that describes her as an “alien,” Liu questions her identity as a perpetual foreigner in her adopted country and her misidentification as an object historically derived from a different Asian ethnicity.

This is the Part I of the life and career of Filipino-American artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004). Abad was born in Batanes, Philippines. Her father was a congressman,  who hoped that his daughter would follow in his career path. While studying law  at the University of the Philippines, Abad began to organize demonstrations opposing the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Her family and their home in Manila became  targets of political violence. In 1969, her parents urged her to leave Manila and finish her law degree in Spain. Abad left the Philippines in 1970.

On her way to Europe, Abad intended to visit a relative in San Franciso, CA. Instead, she decided to stay, enrolling at the University of San Francisco to study Asian history while supporting herself as a seamstress and a typist.

Abad was briefly married to painter George Kleiman, who introduced her to painting. She traveled extensively with her second husband, Jack Garrity, a development economist, and lived abroad in Bangladesh, Yemen, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia. Abad incorporated many different techniques and styles she encountered in her travels into her artwork. Abad would sew, stitch, and collage objects such as stones, sequins, glass, buttons, shells, and mirrors on painted canvas to create vibrantly colorful works. (summarized from the artist’s website)

Stay tuned for Part II of Pacita’s life and career.

Image 1: Front cover

Image 2: Pacita Abad (on the front endpaper)

Image 3: 39°C, 2003 24-colour, paper pulp, mixed media collage on handmade STPI paper 167.6 x 132.1 cm

Image 4: Every day I see circles, 2003 12-color, paper pulp, mixed media collage on handmade STPI paper 101.6 x 127 cm

Nam June Paik (백남준; 1932–2006) was an influential Korean American artist best known for his innovative use of electronic media in his work. He is considered the founder of video art. Paik was born in Seoul, Korea to a wealthy family that owned a textile manufacturing company. In 1950 at the beginning of the Korean War, he and his father fled Korea, moving first to Hong Kong, then later to Japan. He studied music, art history, and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. In 1956, Paik moved to Germany and continued to study Western music and composition at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg. Paik became interested in electronic music while in Germany, where he met John Cage, an American composer/artist and music theorist. Paik began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, and began using televisions in his work.

In 1964, Paik moved to New York, where  he remained for more than forty years. He became a pioneering artist of multimedia installation art, combining video, performance, and music. Moving away from traditional art materials, Paik incorporated televisions, a popular household object, and video, new media at that time, into his art.

May is also National Preservation Month. Paik’s work certainly presents a big challenge to curators and conservators - including our colleagues at the Harvard Art Museums for presenting and preserving the physical integrity of his installations and the media formats he used. Time-based multimedia and digital artworks pose critical questions on how best to preserve and present works in the future when the underlying technology is no longer readily available.

TV Garden, 1974 Image 1 Left: Kunsthalle Bremen, Nov. 14 – Jan. 23, 2000 Right: Installation, 1982

Image 2 Left: Guggenheim Museum, NY, Feb. 11–April 26, 2000 Right: Guggenheim Museum, NY, June 28, 2002–Jan. 12, 2003

This is a Part II of our posts on Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

After the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941, Kuniyoshi, who was legally a Japanese citizen, was re-classified from “resident alien” to an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government. He had to surrender his camera, and his binoculars were confiscated. His bank account was frozen and his movements were restricted. He could not leave his apartment to teach at the Art Students League in the months after the Pearl Harbor, so his students went to his apartment for classes. But, Kuniyoshi was considered relatively fortunate compared to Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants on the West Coast, who were ordered to leave their homes and forced to live in internment camps.

Kuniyoshi was undoubtedly the most famous Japanese artist living in the United States at that time, and he was awarded a first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition during the war. Given the current climate, being singled out for a prize was “almost beyond belief” for Kuniyoshi.

In 1946, the U.S. State Department purchased Kuniyoshi’s Circus Girl Resting (1925) for an international exhibition entitled “Advancing American Art,” which attracted much criticism from conservative politicians and President Truman for its “communistic tendencies.” Kuniyoshi’s painting was singled out again and again as the most offensive work in the exhibition. Despite these odds, Kuniyoshi became the first living artist to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1948.

Kuniyoshi painted many works expressing his anti-war sentiments. But his position was complicated, and he hoped to apply for U.S. citizenship when the McCarran-Walter Act passed in 1952, which finally permitted the naturalization of Asian immigrants. However, before this could become reality, he passed away from a long battle with cancer in 1953.

Image 1: Circus Girl Resting, 1925 38 2/5 x 28 ½ in.

Image 2: Self-Portrait as a Photographer, 1924 20 ½ x 30 ¼ in.

Image 3: Squash, 1924 Pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor on paper 15 ¼ x 22 ¼ in.

This is the Part II of life and career of Pacita Abad whose vibrant and colorful work brightens our day and gives much joy, but also focuses on issues of social inequality, particularly for women of color. As Abad expresses in her artist’s statement:

“I am a painter who paints from the gut, but has a strong social conscience, and my early work often dealt with global social issues. I truly believe that, as an artist, I have a social responsibility for my painting, to try to make our world a little better. I have tried to do this in my small artistic ways: from socio-political paintings series like my “Portraits of Cambodia” and “Immigrant Experience” that make people aware; to abstract painting series like my “Abstract Emotions” and “Endless Blues” that make people think; to public art projects like my colorful “Painted Bridge” that makes people smile; and to the numerous workshops that I have given around the world to help students learn.

I have also been very fortunate to spend most of my artistic career painting in the far-flung corners of the globe and my journeys have been a major inspiration for my paintings. It also has been a tremendous learning experience that has made me acutely aware of the difficult lives many women lead in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Being a woman of color, I also became more sensitive to the less than equal treatment of both women, and people with darker skin throughout the world. This has also made me appreciate how very fortunate I have been as a woman to be brought up in the Philippines, educated in America and live all over the world.”

A disciplined and prolific painter, Pacita Abad created more than 5,000 artworks and even painted a 55-meter long bridge and covered it with 2,350 multi-colored circles just a few months before she passed away. She was a truly global artist with more than 60 solo exhibitions and participation in more than 70 group exhibitions at museums and galleries across the U. S., Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. (Summarized from Brooklyn Museum’s website.)

Image 1: Front cover

Image 2: Pacita Abad (title page)

Image 3: Daydreams (on the left) Oil, mylar, pastel, mirror, cloth on handmade paper 108 x 82 cm

Starry starry night (on the right) Oil, mylar, pastel, mirror, cloth on handmade paper 108 x 78 cm

Image 4: Orange sherbet batik (on the left) Oil, batik, pastel on paper 57 x 77 cm Purple circuit boards (on the right) Oil, batik, pastel on handmade paper 77 x 57 cm

The life and career of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) is reminiscent of the common immigrant’s tale of searching for opportunities in a new country, yet it is an exceptional story within the genre. Not only did Kuniyoshi defeat many odds after emigrating from his native Japan, but he was someone who identified as an American, but could not become a U.S. citizen due to legal restrictions of the time. Also, while Kuniyoshi had an remarkable career, his work is little known today. In 1948, he was the first living artist to be given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Very active in various artists’ groups and organizations, Kuniyoshi became an officer of the American Artists’ Congress in 1936, eventually becoming president and serving in this role until 1944. He was also appointed the first president of Artists Equity and the president of An American Group, Inc.

In 1906, at the age of 16, Kuniyoshi left his home country, Japan in the hope of making a new life in America. In Japan, Kuniyoshi had studied at a school for weaving and learned traditional Japanese decorative arts and how to draw. While attending public high school in Los Angeles, a teacher told him that he had artistic talent. He worked a series of odd jobs from picking fruit in the field to working as a hotel bellhop while attending the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. Eventually, he moved to New York and continued his studies in art.

Kuniyoshi’s time in the U.S. coincides with the spread of anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the country, from the eugenics movement to the Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically cut the number of new immigrants allowed annually and practically banned all immigration from East Asia. In 1919, Kuniyoshi married an American woman, Kathrine Schmidt, for which her parents disowned her and did not speak to the couple for six years. His Boy Stealing Fruit (1923) may be interpreted as “an allegory of the marriage, where a sly boy sneaks a juicy peach from a distinctly “early Americana” bowl.” (E. Brown: pp. 12) His sense of fear, perhaps from anti-immigrant sentiment, may be felt in his other works such as Boy Frightened by Snake (1921-1922) and Child frightened by Water (1924).

Stay tuned for the Part II of Kuniyoshi’s life and career.

Image 1: Boy Stealing Fruit, 1923 20 x 30 in.

Image 2: Child Frightened by Water, 1924 30 1/8 x 24 1/16 in.

Image 3: Self-Portrait, 1918 20 x 16 in