HOUSTON, TX.- Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s drawing practice. For Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), drawing marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in and commitment to art, playing a foundational role as she experimented with diverse materials and processes to develop a distinct visual language. Co-organized by the Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in close collaboration with the estate of Ruth Asawa, the exhibition presents drawings, collages, watercolors, and sketchbooks alongside stamped prints, paperfolds, and copper-foil works, showing the breadth of Asawa’s innovative practice. Ruth Asawa Through Line will be on view at the Menil Drawing Institute until July 21, 2024.

Rebecca Rabinow, Director, The Menil Collection, said: “Ruth Asawa’s drawings are complex and rich, owing much to her striking creativity, her curiosity about the world around her, her cultural background as an American artist of Japanese descent, and her European-based artistic training in the Bauhaus tradition. The Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art are honored to present this first retrospective survey of her drawings.”

A known sculptor, Asawa described drawing as the center of gravity for her creative journey, likening it to an everyday exercise such as “scales for musicians.” The artist spent part of her childhood on a farm in California, enticing her to closely observe nature. “The shapes of the flowers and vegetation, the translucence of the dragonfly’s wing when the sunlight pours through it—these things have influenced my work,” Asawa once said. Calligraphy lessons at a local Japanese school further honed her agility and laid the groundwork for her later training at Black Mountain College.

Edouard Kopp, the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, said: “Ruth Asawa drew on a daily basis, turning everyday encounters into moments of profound beauty. She referred to drawing as her “greatest pleasure and the most difficult”. For her, drawing was an essential way to see, to know and to nurture the world round her, and to imagine what is or might be beyond the visible.”

Ruth Asawa Through Line touches upon eight themes that illuminate the artist's techniques and motifs.

Learning to See

Asawa’s time at Black Mountain College was an influential period that impacted the way she understood her surrounding environments. From the summer of 1946 through the spring of 1949, Asawa studied under groundbreaking artists and thinkers like Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, who encouraged her to push material boundaries. Asawa credited Albers’s lessons with teaching her not only how to draw but “how to see.” Throughout her time at the experimental liberal arts school, Asawa returned to certain subjects and technical challenges, and their lessons reverberated across later bodies of work.

Found and Transformed

Asawa’s penchant for scavenging and perennial resourcefulness prompted her to recognize the aesthetic potential in found objects, which she often used to explore interactions of color and texture. During her 1948 summer job working in the laundry room at Black Mountain, she borrowed the rubber stamps used to mark linens to create evocative abstractions for Albers’s class. When Asawa moved to San Francisco, bike pedals and potatoes offered unexpected methods of mark-making. In the resulting stamped drawings, such as Untitled (Magenta and Orange), 1951–52, Asawa transformed recognizable symbols into abstract compositions.

Forms within Forms

Asawa described her form-within-a-form looped-wire sculptures as three-dimensional drawings in space, explaining that for her, “sculpture was just an extension of drawing.” Perhaps her best-known body of work, these rhythmic wire sculptures stem from her drawing practice, particularly her early graphic experiments with nested biomorphic forms, based in part on the figure of a dancer she observed at Black Mountain. This section brings together line drawings and watercolors alongside embossed copper sheets and collages that show Asawa exploring transparency, layering, and compositional balance in two dimensions.

In and Out

Asawa learned to make origami as a child, later encountering the art form at Black Mountain, where she tested the structural and visual possibilities of paper. Through folding paper, Asawa learned that she could “redefine what paper does” while respecting its inherent properties. Her oil-on-paper studies feature rows of parallelograms in varying color combinations, which oscillate between figure and ground. Asawa’s studies of triangles, such as Untitled (BMC.128, Study of triangles), 1946–49, emphasize the connection between art, nature, and geometry.

Rhythms and Waves

Throughout her career, Asawa maintained a love of patterns, starting at Black Mountain, where she encountered the Greek meander. This repeating geometric pattern, composed of a line that curls in on itself that then uncoils, required skilled hand-eye coordination to ensure negative and positive spaces were treated equally. Asawa was drawn to the rhythmic structure and repetitive nature of patterns, especially apparent in her series of marker drawings. In these works, such as Untitled (FF.1211, Paul Lanier on Patterned Blanket), 1961, the artist cut grooves into the felt tips of markers, making staccato or undulating marks that echo patterns she observed around her, including ocean waves, woven blankets, and San Francisco’s row houses.

Growth Patterns

Intrigued by the growth patterns she observed in nature, Asawa created layered and radiating compositions inspired by tree rings, flowers, and vegetables from her garden. One particularly generative drawing challenge Asawa grappled with was accurately depicting a dried desert plant’s branching forms and delicate contours. Her struggle to render the plant in two dimensions motivated Asawa to turn to sculpture to understand its structural intricacies better. Beginning with a bundle of wire at the center and dividing it as she worked outwards, she untangled the plant’s complexities in her tied-wire sculptures, one of which is presented in this exhibition. She then turned back to the page, creating a series of related drawings, such as Untitled (SD.012, Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Six-Branch Center and Drops at the Ends), c. 1970s, demonstrating her concern for connectedness and consequence.

Curiosity and Control

Asawa’s luminous watercolors and ink paintings on paper testify to the artist’s nimble balance of chance and control, executing meticulous brushwork while embracing effects like blooms, tide lines, and cockling paper. At a young age, Asawa attended calligraphy classes, which she credited with developing her interest in watercolor. She would rely on this early training while learning about transparency, economy of means, and color theory in courses at Black Mountain. In San Francisco, she looked for forms that resonated with her material explorations of drawing on coated paper, a support that encouraged ink to run and gather in pools. The mesmerizing effect of the fluid medium stilled in its tracks inspired depictions of rippling water and gnarled trees, such as Plane Tree #12, 1959, and reappears in Asawa’s cast looped-wire sculptures.

Life Lines

As a young parent and an increasingly active arts educator in San Francisco, Asawa drew as she raised her children, attended meetings, and worked in her garden. A selection of Asawa’s sketchbooks is displayed alongside her drawings of family, friends, and colleagues. Employing her keen observational skills, Asawa captured the character of her subjects, conveying the distinctive quality of a suit jacket’s folds or an infant’s downy hair. Also featured are drawings of the flowers and vegetables she and her husband, Albert Lanier, tended in their backyard garden. In other drawings, Asawa recorded bouquets she received, which can be seen as portraits of the givers. Together, these works illustrate the value Asawa placed in creative labor, the natural world, and her extensive Bay Area community.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Ruth Asawa Through Line is co-curated by Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator, the Menil Drawing Institute and Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Kirsten Marples, Curatorial Associate, the Menil Drawing Institute, and Scout Hutchinson, Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum.