Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was a Japanese-American artist who, like so many women artists of her generation, was largely, criminally overlooked until it was almost too late. Asawa enjoyed her first blush with fame a decade or so ago, when financial hardship forced her to sell a painting by Bauhaus giant Josef Albers — he was a friend and gave it to her decades before — to pay for medical treatment. She was 83. The Albers sale, brokered by Sotheby’s in New York, led to a short twirl in the limelight. Asawa would die a few years later at the age of 87.
Asawa lived to see only a few of the accolades associated with her late-life discovery. Her works landed in important collections like the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, plus there was a spellbinding exhibition of her ghostly, sinuous wire works — one of very few solo shows — at the Pulitzer Foundation in 2018.
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And just last month, Asawa was given her largest platform yet, with 20 of her works featured on US postage stamps. Aside from joining the likes of Norman Rockwell, Alexander Calder, and Andrew Wyeth as American artists to grace the front of our envelopes, Asawa’s arrival here, in one of the most seen spaces for American visual culture, is a story layered with significance.
Part of the tale being recovered here is Asawa’s status as a bystander to the story of 20th-century art. She studied with Albers at the legendarily free-flowing Black Mountain College in the 1950s and had a brief moment of recognition that decade, with her works being collected by the likes of architect Philip Johnson and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Asawa’s personal history is also entwined with the country’s shameful record on race, once again front and center of the national consciousness. Born in California, Asawa learned her intricate wire-weaving craft during World War II when she was a teenager at the Rohwer internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Arkansas. She defied America at its worst to become a creative force — America at its very best.
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It’s impossible not to draw a straight line from a teenage Asawa locked up for no crime but the color of her skin to the thousands of migrants kept in cages at the southern border and the politics of fear and resentment that fueled them. We know what’s happening at the post office, with leadership-induced slowdowns threatening the use of mail-in ballots for the November election is this pandemic-ridden year. The good news is the ballots are soon to be available almost everywhere. Asawa’s stamps already are. Do her art, and her memory, this honor: Vote early, and put an Asawa stamp on it.
Murray Whyte is the Globe’s art critic. He can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheMurrayWhyte
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheMurrayWhyte