Book Report: A Life Made by Hand (79)

4. Andrea D'Aquino, A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa (2019) (1/23/23)

I bought a spate of picture books recently, including this one, which came highly recommended and is about an artist I admire. The story begins with the farm in California where Ruth Asawa grew up in the 1930s. "Working with her hands was an ordinary thing to do." However, she also noticed the world around her, inspecting the shapes of snails, the delicacy of dragonflies, the intricacies of spider webs. She'd draw patterns in the dirt with her bare feet, create tiny animals out of wire, fold origami shapes. Eventually she went to Black Mountain College, where she worked with dancer Merce Cunningham, futurist designer Buckminster Fuller, and color theorist Josef Albers. On a trip to Mexico she learned how to weave baskets with wire—a technique that she developed into the art form she became known for: "graceful sculptures that were light as air." She lived and worked in San Francisco until her death in 2013 at the age of 87.

It's a spare story, and leaves out—by request of Ruth's daughters—her internment during WWII, when she was 16. This part of the story is fully explained in the backmatter, as are many more details of her long life, but her family wished to emphasize her joy and her creative spirit in the book proper. And it does a lovely job of that.

The art is multimedia with collage:

And here are a few of Ruth Asawa's sculptures, some of which I've seen at San Francisco's De Young Museum. The way they interact with light to cast shadows is a beautiful part of their magic.

In 2020, she was honored on US postage stamps:

I think she would have liked both the stamps and this book.

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A few days after posting this I happened upon (on FB, of course) a photograph by her Bay Area neighbor and friend Rondal Partridge of Ruth in her living room, and while searching for that I also found one of her in her studio, also by Partridge. So here's a P.S.: