Mia Ayumi Malhotra :: Ruth Asawa

[A] network of interconnectedness… in which inside is out, and outside is in, and there is no start, no finish, and no separation between these continuous and continually related moments of being.  
         
                                     –Ruth Ozeki, “A Letter to Ruth Asawa”

My home was and is my studio.  
                                    –Ruth Asawa

I’ve had Ruth Asawa on my mind a lot recently. Last month, I saw a retrospective of her work with two beloved artist-mothers who, like me, are drawn to the floating, otherworldly wire sculptures for which she is most well known: forms within forms, suspended in a universe of space and shadow. Walking through the exhibit, I found myself deeply moved by the many, varied forms of her artistic practice—line drawings, bronze castings, clay masks, paintings, wood carvings, lithographs and other printmaking media. I felt buoyed in my own creative practice by her work’s breadth and vitality, along with its complete integration with her family life. 

Visiting Ruth Asawa: Retrospective at SFMOMA

Observing Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures, I marveled at the way in which no element is left untethered; every loop is interlaced by the one that precedes it, as well as by the one that follows. Her life and work offer us a radical understanding of the self, in which all aspects of one’s identity are seamless and continuous, yet also knit into larger structures of being: family, history, and community. Asawa’s commitment to arts education and civic engagement, her experience (shared, incidentally, by my paternal grandmother) of being incarcerated in a Japanese American prison camp in Rohwer, Arkansas during World War II, her children’s lives, her own livelihood—all of it, bound together in her work, every surface opened in radiant relation to the whole. 

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Ruth Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures

All these layered elements—interwoven, floating, yet free—are held together by the line that, by some miracle, possesses the capacity to enclose and define space while letting the air remain air.

One of the most memorable pieces I encountered that day was “Ruth Asawa, 1957,” a silver gelatin print by Imogen Cunningham, in which Asawa is in the midst of weaving one of her wire sculptures. What’s most striking about the portrait, though, is that she is literally in its midst: her head, shoulders, and entire upper body enclosed by the intricate loops of the sculpture-in-progress as it takes shape around her. On her face is a look of utter absorption, her gaze trained on the wire in her hands; on her finger, her iconic wedding ring with its constellated A’s. Contained in a world of her own making, she is simultaneously creating and inhabiting this otherworldly structure as it blossoms around her:

          a shelter / a nest // a place / to hide / a while
          enclosed / in a world // of one’s own / making

Perhaps my favorite part of the retrospective was the artist’s spiral-bound notebooks, filled with pen-and-ink line drawings of her children, flowers and, on one page, a watercolor figure and two suitcases painted by one of her daughters. I felt a surge of familiarity as I recognized in her work one of the features of my own notebooks, whose pages are often accompanied by traces of my kids’ desire to do whatever it is they see me doing. My home was and is my studio. Perhaps, like Ruth, I’ve learned that the more space my creative practices take up in the physical world, the more opportunity to welcome my children into them. So: I sit at the dining table and make sketches of my own, revise poems by hand, cutting and pasting the lines of each new draft with an Exacto knife and glue stick; I write and send letters the old-fashioned way, mend clothing by hand—and my children, observing me, mimic and/or join me at the table, bringing with them new practices of their own.

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“Ruth Asawa Family and Sculpture, 1957” Imogen Cunningham, Seattle Art Museum Blog

  

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​I’m so grateful for Asawa’s life and her gorgeous, airy structures, which remind me that though at times it may not appear this way, the artist-mother’s world is made of continuous and continually related moments of being, and that what may feel like separate dimensions (children, household, poetry, teaching) is really just one thing: my life. ​

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Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, 2025) and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Contest. Mia holds degrees in creative writing from Stanford University and the University of Washington, and her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. She is a Kundiman Fellow and founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches poetry and writes about music and the interior life.

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