A Life Made by Hand is a beautiful title for Andrea D’Aquino’s new book about pioneering Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa whose graceful sculptures “as light as air” are collected in major museums around the world.

I first discovered Andrea D’Aquino’s work in Upper Case, the magazine “for the Creative and Curious” published, edited and designed by Janine Vangool in Calgary. That led me to Andrea’s book Once Upon a piece of Paper: A Visual Guide to Collage Making (Quarto Publishing Group, 2016). I started making ice cream cone shapes for cards for my grandchildren and cutting up old calendars into strips of patterns for collages.

The book, Once Upon a piece of Paper, comes with papers to use, enough to share with other collage enthusiasts!

Children’s books are such a treat as you get to learn something new, the stories are engaging and to the point, and the visuals are enticing as they are in the books Andrea has illustrated, including this one. How wonderful to learn about Ruth Asawa, an artist who has been celebrated but not known to all of us, and to do that honouring with another art form, that of collage.

Ruth’s story begins in California where she was born. Her family worked on a farm and “Ruth looked carefully at everything around her.” Those things included plants, snails, butterflies and spiders. And: “Her hands were always busy making things” out of wire or folded paper.

Ruth went to Japanese school on Saturdays where she learned calligraphy and the language and culture of her heritage. When she was older she went to Black Mountain College. That’s where she met: “People like choreographer Merce Cunningham who made shapes in the air with dancers’ bodies.” One of her “most inventive” teachers was Buckminster Fuller.

It was on a trip to Mexico that Ruth learned how to weave with wire from a local craftsman. Amazing how these rows of squiggles are perfect for representing the wire creations. “In Ruth’s hands, simple wire turned into graceful sculptures that were light as air.”

Even when she had a family of her own, Ruth continued to weave all day. People began to see Ruth’s art in museums and agreed “that her sculptures were beautiful.”

“People go to see Ruth’s art in museums all around the world. You can too.” And so the book ends.

A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019) is aimed at young readers and doesn’t mention Ruth Asawa’s internment during the Second World War until the last pages in a section entitled “More About Ruth Asawa.” In Andrea D’Quinio’s “Author’s Note,” she says Ruth Asawa’s family wishes the book to celebrate Ruth’s life “without allowing the darker facts of her internment to overshadow her art. “

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in February 1942, approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from their homes on the West Coast of the United States and “forced to live in internment camps.” One of the camps was Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia, California where Ruth Asawa met and studied with three Walt Disney illustrators and co-internees.

Ruth was released from an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas and in September 1943, attended college in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She pursued her art education at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. That’s where she met her future husband, Albert Lanier, an architecture student. They married in 1949 and settled in San Francisco where they raised their six children.

In 1968, Ruth co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, eventually bringing professional artists into public school classrooms to teach art, gardening, music, and theater. She helped found a public high school for the arts, later renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. “In 2009, Ruth’s Table, a center for creative learning, was founded at the Bethany Center in San Francisco. Its mission is to foster opportunities for people of all ages to engage in creative expression.”

Born in 1926, Ruth Asawa died in 2013 in her San Francisco home.

As I’ve now introduced my granddaughter Briar to collage with examples, a scrapbook and supplies, I’ll be sending this book to her.

To learn more about Ruth Asawa and her work, visit www.ruthasawa.com.
And have a look at Andrea D’Aquino’s work at www.andreadaquino.com.