Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase
Review of Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase
I had heard of the name Ruth Asawa in passing before, but I had never seen any of her sculptures.
While living in New York City, the only contemporary art museum I would go to was the MoMA and that’s because I was able to get into there for free. I never went to the Whitney or the Guggenheim, which are two of some of my biggest regrets. I wish I had gone to those museums, especially because I now know that the Guggenheim has some of Asawa’s sculptures in their collection.
I picked up this book because of what little I knew of Ruth. She was a Japanese-American artist who had survived internment camps during World War II, and I knew that she was a representative of an entirely new generation of sculptors.
When I picked up this book, I expected very little, but, to be quite honest, when I reached the very end, I actually cried because I was finished it. I felt touched by Ruth and everything she stood for, and now I will be a lifelong fan of her work.
Let’s begin the review.
Ruth Asawa was a Japanese-American sculptor known for her innovative techniques.
Ruth Asawa was born on a farm to two Japanese immigrants in 1926. Her father had moved from Japan in order to try and find a better life in the United States, while her mother, who spoke no English, was one of the brides that were selected from pictures and sent to America to marry the man that picked them.
Her father owned a farm and all of the kids, Asawa’s sisters and brothers, were crafty and also connected to their heritage. They’d go back to Japan and live with their grandparents for a bit to learn about the country in which they came from, and they did traditional things like flower-arranging.
That was something damaging for them in the long-run, as it cast suspicion on them potentially being too linked to the homeland during World War II, when anti-Japanese sentiment increased to an all-time high.
Ruth showed a natural talent for art and even won a county contest drawing for her drawings. But then World War II came, her father was labeled as a spy and interned separately from the family, and then they lost everything that they owned.
The biography traces Asawa’s time in the concentration camps and how she used scrap materials in order to make art, and also shows us, the readers, the resilience of Japanese-Americans during this time. Even when Ruth went off and was about to get her teacher’s degree, she was denied it by her university because she was Japanese.
It was that what finally motivated her in order to commit herself to her life and art. She went to the well-known Black Mountain, met her white husband in an era where it was illegal to marry between races, and built a name for herself as a sculptor. The biography is accompanied with many color and black-and-white photos of Asawa’s life and her work, allowing the reader a sense of guidance in the form of imagery.
Asawa is just an incredible woman. The book does get bogged down by the details of when she fights local school boards, but I think this is necessary to include because Asawa absolutely fought for the right to have arts education.
She is an important figure in San Francisco art history (and broader American art history) because of her unique cultural legacy that she left behind. And she did a lot of this later in life while struggling with lupus, a disease that took away talented creatives like Flannery O’Connor from the world.
There’s also Asawa just as a mom. If you love simple living, you’d be thrilled to read that Asawa embodied the aspects of simple living. She gardened. She dressed like an artist with not-so-new clothing. Her kids were embarrassed by her but she was unapologetically herself.
Asawa rose from poverty and incarceration to become a legend, although she might not be known outside of the more niche art world. And this is a biography that goes quite in-depth, staying relevant, and manages to largely remain interesting even when talking about fights against school boards and whatnot.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a book for people interested in women artists, Asian-American art history, or of inspiring women in general. Asawa was from a completely different time and rose above circumstances to create a solid life for herself. Even if she was not allowed to legally get married to her husband because he was white, she found a way.
Even if she was not originally successful financially, the success found her and people were buying her sculptures for a lot of money as she laid in bed sick.
I became quite attached to her during this biography and was sad to see her go in the end, even though it was inevitable, and I think I’m planning a trip to San Francisco to see some of her work. All in all, I recommend this biography whole-heartedly.
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