I had the great privilege of seeing the Ruth Asawa exhibition at the SFMOMA just before it finished in early September. I thought it was wonderful exhibition - long overdue – with the great virtue of dedicating enough space to allow Ruth’s work to be displayed in the round. For me it was particularly poignant as Ruth had a real impact on my life. I grew up in San Francisco and attended Alvarado Elementary School, where Ruth first created her art programme. I am not in the picture of the group of kids featured in the exhibit, but at least two of my classmates are there (Fred Pei and Michael Streich), and you can just make out my contribution to the mosaic (a rather uninspired square apartment building) that still covers one of the walls around the school playground.
I was also good friends with Ruth’s youngest son, Paul. We spent a lot of time together in their house on Castro Street and at Ruby O’Burke’s ceramics studio on Noe Street. It was wonderful to see the carved front doors, and the collection of masks. They brought back powerful memories of a very special place and time.
And the exhibition gets a lot of stuff right. I loved the less familiar 2-dimensional work, and the concentration on the house and studio, and the art programme. But I did come away with a feeling that the exhibition missed something important. What comes next is not meant as a criticism so much as a personal reflection.
What I missed was the sheer radicalism of what Ruth Asawa did. The exhibition spent so much time charting a narrative of Ruth’s life that it didn’t quite get to the context. The object that really grabbed me (and I don’t know why I didn’t take a picture) was the application for funding from the city from the early 60s, where she described herself as a ‘housewife’. The exhibit card next to it wasn’t very informative, and perhaps it has been more fully analysed in one of the recent books or the museum catalogue. But what struck me forcefully at that moment was that Ruth’s early career spanned the first decade and a half of second wave feminism, the birth of her six children bookended by Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique (1963). And that the neighbourhood she chose to build a life in, was – in the 1950s – an unusual place, marked by its diversity, working class history and cheapness. It was also a very political place. Harry Bridges, leader of the 1933 Longshorman’s strike, lived just a few blocks away. And Bill and Sylvia Powell – tried for treason and exonerated between 1959 and 61 – lived ten minutes’ walk on the other side of 24th Street. The Powells were at the centre of a Bay Area wide, and international, socialist community. It was also the first destination of many emigrants from Ireland, Italy, Mexico and the Philippines (redlining excluded most Black and Chinese residents). My grandfather’s first home in the city on landing from Italy in 1921 was on Castro at 27th Street. As importantly, in the early 50s it was one of the few ‘mixed’ neighbourhoods in San Francisco where you could get a mortgage. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s redlining map of 1937 described the area as marked by: age, obsolescence, and change of style’, and marred by the, ‘infiltration of a lower grade population; … inadequate transportation, insufficient utilities, … poor maintenance of homes…’ According to the map it was a neighborhood lacking that all important 1950s attribute, ‘homogeneity’. And, of course, just over the hill, even in the 1950s, the Castro was home to a vibrant gay community with a slew of bars. I was always impressed by the Pendulum with its wonderful neon sign.
Ruth developed her art and practice in a context where both class and gender were all-important; and where the long history of race and urban planning cast a dark shadow. I am too young to remember the ‘50s properly (born in 1957) but trying to think through what Ruth was doing in that place in that decade (and the one that came after), changed how I thought about the exhibition and her life.
It was this context that made that word ‘housewife’ stand out. It felt more like a challenge than a description – a simple and very self-conscious dare to the judges of the funding competition to dismiss her work as coming from some banal ‘domestic’ space, when she could have concentrated on her very real claims to professional artistic authority (and New York experience).
In other words, it felt like the exhibition missed the opportunity to unpick a series of profound political statements. These may have been made in abstract wire and bronze, and in the locations (including Alvarado Elementary) Ruth chose to put her incredible talents to work, but they were political. My mother was of just Ruth’s generation, and through her, I knew lots of smart, well-educated women, all with artistic aspirations living in that neighbourhood. My recollection is that they all bought Betty Friedan’s image of the domestic as a cage, holding them back - that they were all great artists and writers, prevented from fulfilling their potential by the unsubtle forces of patriarchy and heteronormativity. And, of course, it was true. But what Ruth was doing was subverting the ’domestic’ from inside – using the authority of domestic spaces (and arguably motherhood) as a part of a powerful political statement. I suspect that Imogen Cunningham was doing something similar – or at least related - via her photos of the body.
The wire art itself turned domestic labour – weaving and knitting – into an industrial process. The choice of copper to weave and knit; and salt dough and plaster of paris as a basis for bronze castings, felt hugely self-conscious. Even as a ten-year-old being encouraged to make ‘art’ from salt dough felt transgressive, at odds with the utilitarian thinking behind the school programmes I was familiar with. The art programmes of the day had been designed in the 20s and 30s, and were directed at turning out skilled hands for the factories and manufacturing.
The contrast that springs to my mind is with Richard Serra’s, almost contemporary, steel castings. Serra grew up on the other side of the city and was introduced to the beauty of metal at Hunters Point (where his father worked as a pipe fitter) and as a teenage labourer in the steel mills of the east bay. Where Serra’s art is macho and designed to intimidate with the overwhelming power of the products of working class, male, labour; Ruth’s abstract art did something entirely different. Both these abstractions in metal were political, but in very different ways.
I don’t know what Ruth Asawa’s political views were, but the choice to dedicate her life to turning the domestic into the most public and inclusive of art forms feels profoundly political to me, and having worked through the exhibition I missed a sense of that raw radicalism.
