Contents for May 19th, 2025
CONTENTS (please click on the links or scroll down for complete information on each post):
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1. Chris DAZE Ellis, FF Alumn, at 550 Madison Avenue, Manhattan
2. Yoko Ono, FF Alumn, now online at Timeout.com
3. Jess Dobkin, FF Alumn, at Festival TransAmériques, Montreal, Canada, June 1
4. Alva Rogers, FF Alumn, now online at NewYorker.com
5. Xinan Helen Ran, FF Alumn, at Essex Flowers, Manhattan, opening May 23
6. Ann P Meredith, FF Member, at Provincetown Commons, MA, June 6
7. Eileen Myles, FF Alumn, now online at NYTimes.com
8. Beth B., Barbara Hammer, Michelle Handelman, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Ela Troyano, Andy Warhol, FF Alumns, at MoMA, Manhattan, May 28-June 11
9. Howardena Pindell, FF Alumn, at Asia Society, Manhattan, thru Aug. 10
10. Coreen Simpson, FF Alumn, new Aperture publication
11. David Wojnarowicz, FF Alumn, at Hal Bromm Gallery, Manhattan, opening May 22
12. Doug Skinner, FF Alumn, at NYU Bobst Library, Manhattan, May 25, and more
13. Karen Finley, FF Alumn, at Freight & Volume, Manhattan, thru July 25
14. Judith Sloan & Warren Lehrer, FF Alumns, at A.R.T./NY Studios, Manhattan, May 20
15. Kathy Brew, FF Alumn, receives Best Short Doc at the 2025 NY Film & Female Actress Award
16. Marina Abramović, FF Alumn, now online at NYTimes.com
17. Walter Krochmal, FF Alumn, at La Nacional, Manhattan, May 28
18. Benoît Maubrey, FF Alumn, now online at https://vimeo.com/1083159222
19. Devora Neumark, FF Alumn, now online at linkedin.com
20. Christo & Jeanne-Claude, FF Alumns, now online at NYTimes.com
21. Graciela Cassel, FF Alumn, at Vital Studios, Sunnyside, Queens, opening May 22 and more
22. Mark Bloch, FF Alumn, in Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2025
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1. Chris DAZE Ellis, FF Alumn, at 550 Madison Avenue, Manhattan
If you’re walking by 550 Madison Avenue at 55th Street, you’ll see the beginning of something cool. In collaboration with the Olayan Group and Chris DAZE Ellis, the Museum of the City of New York is bringing “Above Ground Midtown: MCNY x DAZE” to life. This special project extends the celebration of graffiti art from our exhibition “Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, into East Midtown, drawing inspiration from both the city’s rhythm and hte building’s iconic public garden.
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2. Yoko Ono, FF Alumn, now online at Timeout.com
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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3. Jess Dobkin, FF Alumn, at Festival TransAmériques, Montreal, Canada, June 1
You are invited!
SUNDAY/DIMANCHE JUNE 1st!!!!!
Jess Dobkin’s WETROSPECTIVE Montreal launch performance + dance party
*FREE / GRATUIT*
QG of the FTA (Festival TransAmériques)
175 President Kennedy, Montreal
Doors/Portes : 19h
Performances : 19h30
Hot Flash! : 21h – 23h30
MC Nathalie Claude with Jordan Arseneault, John Custodio, Itza Gutiérrez, Winnie Ho + Justin de Luna, Moynan King, Rickie Leach, Anna Jane McIntyre, Dayna McLeod, Alexis O’Hara, Crying in the Shower, Alex Tigchelaar, Sherwin Tjia, Jacob Wren, Wetrospective book editor Laura Levin, and other surprise guests 🙂
Presented in collaboration with TransAmericas Festival and Hemispheric Encounters
In English et en français
Wheelchair accessible
Dive into an unforgettable evening celebrating Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance Archives (Ed. Laura Levin). Grab a signed copy, snag limited-edition artist multiples, and revel in queer community magic.Stay for Hot Flash—a sweaty, fun, early-evening sock-wrestling-and-dance-party for menopausal queers and our lovers, friends, fans, and allies.
Artist, curator and Toronto activist, Jess Dobkin unveils her striking monograph: Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance Archives, conceived in collaboration with Laura Levin. An evening full of performances by her flamboyant peers in the queer community to celebrate collaboration, creativity and solidarity. Signed copies and limited edition surprises! Following the playful Hot Flash party. Loves, friends and allies are invited to a micro-evening of dance and lucha queer.
@vivamtl @ftamontreal @intellectbooks @hemi_encounters @natqueenclaude @ellex6 @itzapapalote @peacheslepoz @annajanemcintyre @laura_m_levin @jacob_wren_writer @bitch_emerita
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4. Alva Rogers, FF Alumn, now online at NewYorker.com
Please visit this link:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/hilton-als-on-the-visionary-world-of-alva-rogers
Thank you.
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5. Xinan Helen Ran, FF Alumn, at Essex Flowers, Manhattan, opening May 23
Xinan Helen Ran | Silk Compass
May 23 – June 22
Opening Reception: Friday, May 23, 6-9pm
Essex Flowers presents Silk Compass, the third solo exhibition by Xinan Helen Ran. This research-driven project draws the artist’s collection of wartime cartographic artifacts, transforming them into a layered environment of etchings, drawings, and signage. Silk Compass examines both the literal and metaphorical layers of maps, setting “then” and “now” into restless orbit and capturing the illusory permanence of tools and progress.
Beginning in late 1942, the United States and Great Britain produced more than 3.5 million acetate-rayon “silk” escape maps– quiet to unfold, double-sided, and resistant to salt and mildew– to help Allied troops evade capture. Closely related to spy-gadgets devised by the British intelligence unit MI9, these silk charts anchor Ran’s inquiry.
The Arctic, 1598 ↔ 1951
Two giant banners chart the installation’s path. Hand-traced on silk, one of the banners recreates Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz’s 1598 engraving of the polar regions, enlivened with sea monsters and phantom islands; the other reproduces a Cold War-era silk map of the same region, produced by the Aeronautical Chart Service in 1951.
The pair– each designed for survival and secrecy– shows how a landscape shifts from Renaissance myth to Cold War battleground. Yet both reveal the same illusions: the limits of knowledge, the permanence of borders, and our supposed mastery over nature. Even the more sophisticated army Arctic map proves to be a fable; now with global warming rearranging the “permanent” ice cap faster than regimes can redraw borders.
Manchuria, 1943 ↔ 2025
A second dialogue between WWII and the present unfolds in a trio of etchings derived from a 1944 silk map of Manchuria, then a puppet state under Imperial Japan. Printed on copper-clad circuit boards (PCB), the works enlarge the Da Hinggan Ling region– Ran’s birthplace. For each finished piece, she overprints up to seven PCB plates, fusing the logics of traditional printmaking and circuit fabrication. As viewers progress through the sequence, the vision gradually clarifies; only the final print fully spells “Manchuria.” This measured reveal echoes Ran’s own first encounter with the map: caught between awe and bewilderment as she held this eBay find in her Brooklyn Apartment.
As she examined the map, a new question surfaced: if survival hinges on orientation, what happens when the map itself lacks credibility? A note in the bottom-left corner identifies this NK50 chart as a patchwork of four Soviet, Chinese and British sources. Place-names shift among Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, and Russian transliterations, while clashing projections distort distance. Furthermore, constrained by its very medium, the fabric map cannot convey the immaterial fault lines of culture, allegiance, identity and power that layer a war zone– imperceptible to the pilots flying above, for whom these maps were their “last hope” of safe return.
Folded like a kerchief, the original Manchurian silk map rests in the back of the space. After the war, it was anecdotally handed out as a souvenir at the hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica– the only Shangri-La chain in the US– likely in the 1970s. The accompanying note further romanticized the not-so-distant past of wartime survival.
Maps were, and will never cease to be, attempts to completely experience reality. As physical charts yield to algorithmic ones, and personal data constructs new frontiers, maps harbor and extend fictions, biases– “paper towns”. How, then, do we safely escape and find our way home, my comrades?
Special thanks to MacDowell in Peterborough, NH,
all works in this exhibition were created there in Spring 2025
Xinan Helen Ran (b. 1994. Inner Mongolia, China) creates scalable installations, searching for the point where trauma, nihilism, and humor converge. Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow, a 2024 More Art Commission Artist, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator, and an aspiring set designer for new theaters. www.xinanran.work
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6. Ann P Meredith, FF Member, at Provincetown Commons, MA, June 6
Since January 1970 Swordfish Productions has been creating Social Impact Art, Film, Photography and Theatre to give a compassionate and realistic face and voice to people and cultures who have been injured, marginalized under-represented and therefore under-served
Facts
1 out of every 4 Girls and 1 out of every 6 Boys will be sexually assaulted before they reach the age of 18
93% of victims Know their attacker
High School Girls are 5X more at Risk
SPECIAL is a Healing Tool for the World
SPECIAL Changes People’s lives Forever
For Help Contact
Provincetown PRIDE Center 115 Bradford Street
508.975.6394
Outer Cape Health Services 49 Kemp Way 508.487.9395
Helping Our Women 34 Conwell Street 617.719.6865
Cast
Loren, Ann, Jen, Nat, Anne, Sam, Tamora
Swordfish Productions Pictures & Theatricals
+1.917.806.9078 annpmeredith7@gmail.com
SPECIAL
An Acclaimed Feature Film and
Award-Winning Theatre Project
by
Writer Director Producer Ann P Meredith
SCRIPTED PERFORMANCE
June 6th 2025 – 630-830pm
Provincetown Commons
A Collaborative Workspace for Artists
46 Bradford Street Provincetown, MA 02657
508.257.1748 www.provincetowncommons.org
All Welcome – Free and Open to the Public
Produced by Swordfish Productions
Pictures & Theatricals www.annpmeredith.com
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7. Eileen Myles, FF Alumn, now online at NYTimes.com
Please visit this link:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/30/books/new-york-city-books.html
Thank you.
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8. Beth B., Barbara Hammer, Michelle Handelman, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Ela Troyano, Andy Warhol, FF Alumns, at MoMA, Manhattan, May 28-June 11
Please visit this link:
https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5807#events
Thank you.
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9. Howardena Pindell, FF Alumn, at Asia Society, Manhattan, thru Aug. 10
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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10. Coreen Simpson, FF Alumn, new Aperture publication
For up to the minute information about
Coreen Simpson: A Monograph
Vision & Justice (publication October 2025) please visit this link:
https://aperture.org/books/coreen-simpson-a-monograph
Thank you.
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11. David Wojnarowicz, FF Alumn, at Hal Bromm Gallery, Manhattan, opening May 22
Join us for the opening reception Friday, May 22, 6-8
Hal Bromm Gallery is pleased to present THE QUEER SHOW PART II, a continuation of an exhibition series exploring how artists have contributed to our modern notion of queer identity. There will be an opening reception on Friday May 22, 6-8 pm.
The exhibition expands Part I’s exploration of queer history into the present moment. Foregrounding recent works that speak to the nature of queerness in our present time, it examines how queer artists imagine and realize queer futures within their work. THE QUEER SHOW PART II features works by Rajab Ali Sayed, Juan Arango Palacios, Nayland Blake, Chris Cortez, Abbey Gilbert, Nan Goldin, Jay Lynn Gomez, Glenn Ligon, Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Eric Rhein, Richard Taddei, Moises Salazar Tlatenchi, Richard Taddei, Koco Toribio, and David Wojnarowicz, across a wide array of media, from traditional painting, to multimedia constructions, photography, and textile art. The work will be on view May 22 – July 25 at 90 West Broadway in Tribeca, NYC.
Hal Bromm
90 West Broadway, Tribeca
Open Tuesday-Saturday, 12-5
(212) 732-6196
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12. Doug Skinner, FF Alumn, at NYU Bobst Library, Manhattan, May 25, and more
Greetings, avid readers! I’m happy to inform you that my annotated translation of Isidore Isou’s “Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara” is now available from Black Scat Books. Isou, the founder of the artistic movement Letterism, was a great admirer of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. So, when Tzara died in 1963, Isou disrupted the funeral to give the great provocateur a properly raucous sendoff. Isou’s lively account of the proceedings is both a polemic against traditional funerals and a warm tribute to Tzara. My translation was first published in 2012; this revised edition is much improved.
[https://blackscatbooks.com/2025/05/10/isou-rocks/]
Sukhdev Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture will help launch the Further Reading Library, a new imprint edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert. I’ll be on hand to give a talk on the subject of one of their books, Richard Shaver, who painted the visions he saw in rocks. We’ll also discuss the other books in the series (I wrote the introduction to one on light show pioneer Thomas Wilfred). I’ll bring some of my books for you to buy or gawk at. All of this, and more, will happen Sunday, May 25, at 2:30, at the NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, in NYC. Admission is free, but you have to RSVP. The details are at
Doug Skinner
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13. Karen Finley, FF Alumn, at Freight & Volume, Manhattan, thru July 25
Karen Finley
More Desperate Than Ever
Freight & Volume 39 Lispenard St.
Tribeca, NYC
thru July 25, 2025
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14. Judith Sloan & Warren Lehrer, FF Alumns, at A.R.T./NY Studios, Manhattan, May 20
We are continuing to develop Imperfect Allies: Children of Opposite Sides
In October 2023, Najla Said and Judith Sloan began working on a series of conversations as playwrights, colleagues, friends, and creators for a project that seeks to address being Palestinian and Jewish Americans in the current moment. We are in the middle of fundraising to develop this into a fully realized performance and will be sharing the work as it progresses. We are pleased to announce that we have brought Suzanne Agins on board as dramaturg and director.
Opening Act: Najla and Judith join author/designer Warren Lehrer
in a multimedia presentation of his book Jericho’s Daughter.
Please join us if you can on
Tuesday May 20th at 7:30 pm
A.R.T./NY Studios
520 Eighth Avenue, 3rd Floor
This event is in person. Tickets are by donation, (more if you can, less if you can’t). If you cannot come, but would like to make a donation to keep this project going, please note that when you click below.
https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XAE24JAVBXUAW
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15. Kathy Brew, FF Alumn, receives Best Short Doc at the 2025 NY Film & Female Actress Award
Just learned that FOLLOWING THE THREAD has won another award: Best Short Doc at the 2025 New York Film and Female Actress Award. If interested, it can be streamed on Vimeo from my Educational Distributor, DER. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/followingthethread
Thank you.
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16. Marina Abramović, FF Alumn, now online at NYTimes.com
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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17. Walter Krochmal, FF Alumn, at La Nacional, Manhattan, May 28
Manhattan’s Newest Monthly Arthouse Film and Arts Event, “A Night at La Nacional,” Returns to Its Historic Venue on West Fourteenth Street (May 28th)
DATE & TIME: Wed. May 28, 2025 5:30 pm – 11pm
VENUE: La Nacional – 239 West 14th Street (MANHATTAN)
Full programme link:
https://www.bronxworldfilm.org/a-night-at-la-nacional
Downtown Manhattan comes alive again with the third night of its new monthly film/arts event launched in April, “A Night at La Nacional,” a worldly mix of contemporary arthouse, performance, music, visual arts and more in the great downtown tradition at the landmark venue of La Nacional (Spanish Benevolent Society) on West 14th Street. Produced in partnership with Bronx World Film, it offers filmmakers, performers, artists and communities a lively hub to share work and forge partnerships while drawing new patrons to La Nacional, one of the city’s oldest non-profits and recently dubbed “a hidden gem” by the Daily News. La Nacional is the last remnant of Manhattan’s “Little Spain” neighborhood.
After a wildly successful April launch spotlighting contemporary Spanish cinema, May’s marqueé brings us headliners The Rise, a film by actress/chanteuse Laura Scaglia (SWI) in its avant-première, and ICETEA, Alessia Buiatti’s biting futurist drama. For the performance component we have a mini-concert by Venezuelan Mafer Bandola, a bandora virtuoso, teacher and arts activist; original songs by Maximilian Kempf and a play excerpt by Nancy Finn with Elizabeth Caruso and Eva Sorel. Guest visual artist Dr. Narengy fills the gallery with cartoon drawings of her “goofy, whimsical and silly monsters” and surprise guests will be announced closer to the date. Doors open at 5:30 for the mixer and art exhibit, performances at 6:30, the film screening at 8 followed by a Q & A, after-party and mixer. Bronx World Film and La Nacional welcome one and all to an event, venue and company you will not want to leave.
Admission to “A Night at La Nacional” is free. Donations accepted.
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18. Benoît Maubrey, FF Alumn, now online at https://vimeo.com/1083159222
Please visit this link:
Thank you
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19. Devora Neumark, FF Alumn, now online at linkedin.com
Please visit this link:
Thank you.
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20. Christo & Jeanne-Claude, FF Alumns, now online at NYTimes.com
Please visit this link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/arts/design/art-museums-christo-jean-claude-revival.html
Thank you.
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21. Graciela Cassel, FF Alumn, at Vital Studios, Sunnyside, Queens, opening May 22 and more
Dear Friends:
I am very excited to share this news. Im honored to be participating in these events
This coming week:
“Ocean”.May 22, at 50-14 Skillman Avenue, Queens, at Vital Studios curated by Raluca Anchidin.
Bayshore Ecology Biennial: Essential Shore, Permeable Futures Curated by Jennifer McGregor and Stand 4 Gallery, Jeannine Bardo
Romance in the Garden: Curated by West Harlem Sculpture Garden, curated by Savona McClain, and Art Crawl Harlem: Ulysses Williams
Through the Mirror: Labocine: Micrographia June session
Curated by Ringo Marquez.https://www.labocine.com.
Graciela Cassel
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22. Mark Bloch, FF Alumn, in Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2025
I am immensely honored to share with you this except from Woman’s Art Journal 46.1 (Spring/Summer 2025) which included my review of two recent books on Ruth Asawa, Ruth Asawa: Through Line, Edited by Kim Conaty and Edouard Kopp Menil Collection and Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023 and Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape, Written and illustrated by Sam Nakahira Getty Publications, 2024. The issue is available from Editorial Offices: Woman’s Art Journal, 628 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123, USA, Web: womansartjournal.org E-mail:waj@womansartjournal.org
Reviewed by Mark Bloch
These two recent books on Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) could not be more unalike, but they comple- ment each other well. With much writ- ten in a short period of time since the art world’s “discovery” of Asawa, it is not surprising that Through Line focuses on a less widely known aspect of her work, namely her drawings, rather than what has been familiar thus far: her captivat- ing biography and her unique hanging looped-wire sculptures. The graphic novel An Artist Takes Shape retells the story of her life, but in a fresh way, while Through Lines, the catalogue of an exhibi- tion at the Menil Collection in Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, reveals what lies behind the sculpture: a lifetime of drop- dead-gorgeous Asawa drawings. Both books show how Asawa externalized her sensitivity through her quirky yet profoundly sensible ways of working. Both reveal, too, how this praxis was acquired: through a lifelong dedication to pedagogy, as both learner and teacher.
Through Line comprises four medium- sized essays and eight mini-essays, all heavily illustrated. As the Menil and the Whitney had begun planning Asawa drawing shows simultaneously, they “happily joined forces,” explain the respective directors of these two American institutions, Rebecca Rabinow and Adam D. Weinberg (now former), in their foreword to this large tome (6).The editors of this impressive volume are the show’s curators, Kim Conaty, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney, and Edouard Kopp, the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator at the Menil Drawing Institute. The five- page exhibition checklist totals some one hundred thirty-five works, mostly drawings on paper in graphite pencil, colored pencil, ink (sometimes stamped or painted), crayon, pastel, oil, and/or gouache, but also collages, copper reliefs, and wire sculptures as well as photographs of Asawa in the act of drawing or of folding paper. Drawn from a wide variety of sources, including Asawa’s papers at Stanford, the Black Mountain College archives in North Carolina, and many private collections, the works and photographs have been supplemented here in the catalogue by several dozen additional images. But while the first chapter traces Asawa’s steps through her drawing life, no formal chronology graces Through Line; readers receive a much more systematic understanding of Asawa’s biography, or at least its first quarter- century, from the graphic novel.
In An Artist Takes Shape, published by the Getty and Abrams Books, illustrator Sam Nakahira (she/they) from Los Angeles evokes the milestones of Asawa’s life pictorially, weaving a tale for audiences of almost all ages and lev- els of sophistication, approaching diffi- cult subject matter directly with comic- book user-friendliness. Billed as her debut graphic novel, the slender hard- cover volume lives up to Nakahira’s intention for all of her work as laid out in “About the Author”: exploring over- looked histories within Japanese and Japanese-American history and mytho- logy. In simple black outlines and shades of gray, she depicts the first twenty-five years or so of Asawa’s life with honesty, grace, and charm: Asawa, determined, courageous, and unconven- tional, lets nothing stop her from becom- ing an artist, even when confronted with profound, deeply disturbing prejudice. In a suggested reading list at the end of the book are the documentaries, inter- views, and secondary sources upon which Nakahira has relied.
Nakahira portrays Asawa’s youth idyllically on her family’s farm in Southern California—until Pearl Harbor is bombed and West Coast Japanese Americans are forced into camps. An Artist Takes Shape shows Asawa’s father being hauled away for incarceration and sixteen-year-old Ruth being sent, along with her mother and most of her siblings, to a detention center at Santa Anita Racetrack. Exclamations like “UGH! Nothing will get the horse smell out of my clothes” and “I wish I’d brought my flyswatter” humanize the experience of the detainees (24–25). During her imprisonment at the racetrack and then, for a longer time, at an internment camp in Arkansas, Asawa dreams of becoming an artist, and a fortuitous string of knowledgeable teachers nurture her interest and skills, including three Walt Disney Studios animators also held at Santa Anita: “Everything was gray until I met the cartoonists” (28). Asawa attends Milwaukee State Teachers College to become an art teacher, but after a student-teaching placement falls through due to more anti-Japanese hostility, she travels to the experimental Black Mountain College (BMC) in North Carolina.
The BMC community comes alive in Nakahira’s panels—above all, the influential professor Josef Albers, who points outdoors and tells students, “I want to see what you can make with the simplest of materials. Open your eyes and see” (55). Asawa is attentive to her new BMC friends and to these new ways of learning. After a trip to Mexico in summer 1947 where she has “the most beautiful encounter” with wire egg baskets (65), she returns to BMC and meets her life partner, the architect Albert Lanier, who admires “all those mad little gardens on campus” Asawa has planted (69). Against their parents’ wishes, they marry and construct a loving postwar domestic life in San Francisco, where they start a family. The older photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) becomes a close friend and offers advice on being a woman artist. Asawa’s wire basket- making leads to a groundbreaking development: the creation of the hanging wire sculptures Asawa is now in- creasingly revered for. Asawa describes her first experiment in this medium as “so exciting and alive!” (88; Fig. 1). The final page spread presents Nakahira’s drawings of some of these sculptures and of iconic photographs of Asawa that appear in Through Lines, including one by Cunningham.
The story of Asawa’s life beyond the early 1950s, the point at which Nakahira’s book ends, emerges piecemeal from the exhibition catalogue Through Lines. Just as BMC professors Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Anni Albers (1899–1994), and fellow BMC students Ray Johnson, Hazel Larsen (1921–2001), and others had embraced her personality, contributions, and style, including her willingness to experiment and her appreciation for collegiality, so too did communities of family members, friends, and artists in the Bay Area, who provided needed support while reaping reciprocal benefits from her presence. Asawa’s life played out in the form of public art commissions; gallery and museum exhibitions; membership in the San Francisco Arts Commission; involvement in local educational programs, including the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, which she co-founded with artist and architectural historian Sally Woodbridge (1930–2019); and the near-constant practice of art-making, concurrently with raising her six children and then onward until her death in 2013. Even during a difficult convalescence with lupus, she never stopped drawing.
Through Line argues that Asawa’s sketching and mark-making practice was the unifying thread in her artistic practice as a whole and intimately connected to her now-familiar sculptural style, which she referred to as “drawing in space” (11). A wonderfully varied output from the late 1940s to the 1990s, including many daily page spreads shown here, became a way for Asawa to see and understand the world; they now provide a way we can understand her. Through Line traces Asawa’s journey in the drawing medium from before her first formal art lessons in internment camps through her formative time at BMC and beyond, featuring a comprehensive overview of the artist’s drawings in several media, including many never before published.
After the acknowledgments and a preface by Conaty and Kopp, the pair of editors embark individually on their respective parts of the book’s four major essays, Conaty first with “‘Your Hand Is Already Flowing’: Ruth Asawa’s Daily Practice of Drawing,” while Kopp concludes the four with “Instinct and Inquiry: Ruth Asawa’s Use of Drawing Materials and Techniques.” In between and shorter are “Drawn Together: Ruth Asawa and Community” by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Stanford, and an exploration of “The Pedagogical Value of Paper” by Jordan Troeller, a postdoctoral researcher, historian and theorist at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Setting the stage for the essays, Conaty’s ideas are joined by many examples of Asawa’s sketchbook pages focusing on people, plants and patterns, miniaturized but still intriguing, readable and beautiful, opened to spreads, and strategically assembled to create new spreads that pepper, then follow the words in sumptuous mini- reproductions. Some Arkansas high school yearbook pages also populate the twelve pages of text (including endnotes) that explore how Asawa’s youth in a Japanese American farming household with six siblings, with each expected to help out, resulted in Ruth’s careful eye-hand coordination and became useful later when she wielded a brush, studied “breathing lines” (13) in Albers’s BMC Design and Color classes, and echoed the cultural traditions of her childhood in the Asawa-Lanier household.
In “Drawn Together,” about commu- nity, Alexander explores Asawa’s com- mitment to relationships with plants and animals as well as humans to ensure survival, supplemented by images: sculptural forms in more sketchbook spreads; drawn and photographed images of plaster masks of the faces of friends, family members, and fellow artists; she created and an image printed in 1982 on the program cover of the fifth annual Imogen Cunningham Award presentation, drawn a year before her friend’s death. Whether teaching gar- dening to children, creating public art commissions in the 1970s and 1980s, or supporting her spouse’s architectural work, Asawa’s art practice was abun- dantly linked to complex community situations she weathered, contributed to, and thrived in.
In “The Pedagogical Value of Paper,” including one sketch and ten photos of paper and paper-folding, and several stunning in black and white, illustrate the medium’s intersection with pedagogy in Asawa’s work, where no distinction existed between the professional artist and public school systems, past and present, manifesting the tessellated forms she and her husband’s professional practice both inherited from (and deeply respected in) Albers’s routines and ideas that evolved from his own training in Wilhelmine, Germany, as a primary school teacher and drawing instructor before he developed and embodied the Bauhaus foundation course, a bedrock of BMC. Finally, “Instinct and Inquiry” expands on the preceding chapter regarding Asawa’s exposure to radical experimentation in Albers’s Basic Design (or Werklehre) course at BMC based on a merging of perception and tactility in the matière and leaf studies that cultivated Asawa’s use of drawing materials and techniques, broken down into five brief subsections: “Matière,” “Layering,” “Stamping,” “Marking,” and “Paper.” The materiality and hands- on experiences of her schooling come to life in repetitive brushstroke, pen and printed images, as do Zip-A-Tone illustrations she later employed using layered dots or photomechanical processes with Xerox machines. In the concluding essay, Asawa explains how “I try to stay out of the picture” while remaining very present (60).
In the second half of the book, a section of eight short thematic essays on aspects of Asawa’s oeuvre cuts across time, reflecting an art practice often built of lines but emanating from Asawa in ways that were more circular and cyclical than linear. Each of the “Eight Themes” is followed by about fifteen pages of images reproduced in exacting detail. The first mini-essay, “Learning to See,” is by Isabel Bird, a Menil Drawing Institute pre-doctorate fellow. Bird discusses how Asawa employed strong color contrasts, repeated and decon- structed shapes, and object rotation to “rigorously test the dimensions of positive and negative space” (69). The sixteen plates provide elements arranged in patterns, from circles and parts of parallelograms to realistically captured jello molds, hands, and feet to number and letter forms appearing in series.
Next comes the mini-essay “Found and Transformed,” highlighting Asawa’s resourcefulness in using scavenged objects to stamp marks onto paper. Authored by Scout Hutchinson, who at the time of the book’s publication was a Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney and is now an Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum, the essay looks at Asawa employing fish, leaves, potato prints, rubber laundry stamps, and a bike pedal as art-making tools, examples of the type of “scroung[ing] around,” as Asawa herself put it (89), that the artist did at and after BMC. For Asawa, Hutchinson submits, “working with found objects was the result of growing up on a working farm where … art emerge[d] from the remnants of daily life” (90).
Hutchinson also contributed three other essays. “In and Out” treats Asawa’s lifelong interest in the methods of paper folding. Hutchinson demon- strates that Asawa’s work in this medi- um was rooted in Albers’s and Fuller’s pedagogy at BMC as well as in Asawa’s own forays into origami as a child. Asawa recalled Fuller speaking of “how paper breathes” and Albers telling stu- dents that “folded paper had its own heartbeat” (124). Paper folding was essential to drawing and sculpture class- es at BMC because of what the page is capable of: bearing weight, tolerating twists, and holding memories of its his- tory (123–4; see also 40). Asawa not only created paper-fold works, including large-scale props for a 1989 dance per- formance, but also rendered folded forms in two dimensions, like her 1951– 52 screenprints of logarithmic spirals.
Hutchinson’s “Curiosity and Control” showcases Asawa’s watercolors and ink paintings. Asawa had taken calligraphy lessons at age eight and resumed them in the mid-1950s, this time with a Buddhist priest at a San Francisco mission. In applying watercolor and ink, Asawa’s awareness of not just what her brush did but also what it didn’t do; her use of swift stroke successions, each dependent on a predecessor; her approach of doing less to get more; and her sensitivity to how different types of paper absorbed and repelled water all served to bring persimmons, a watermelon, lilies, irises, trees, and more to life. “My favorite time is when I’m doing watercolors,” she once said (179).
Hutchinson’s final leitmotif, the book’s last, “Life Lines,” further unwraps Asawa’s “less-is-more” philosophy, this time in the portraits and organic subjects on sketchbook pages that unleash plants, animals, her six children, her husband, and her friends. In distilling her own experiences as well as those of the subjects who sat for her, knowingly and unknowingly, Asawa captured essences, from an infant’s hair to a blanket’s wrinkles to pianist David Tudor’s hands. Asawa transformed even the humdrum— pieces of furniture, colleagues at bureaucratic business meetings—into pure romance.
Kirsten Marples, a Curatorial Associate at the Menil Drawing Institute, contributed three two-pagers. In “Rhythms and Waves,” she shows how Albers’s lessons on the meander motif taught Asawa’s eye to move ahead of her pencil as she turned the form on itself, folding and unfolding or coiling and uncoiling the shape. In 1950s and 1960s marker drawings, she made incisions into felt-tipped pens that yielded multiple parallel lines, allowing her to create fine patterns that visited her world in the form of babies on quilted blankets (Fig. 2), plants, fruit, row houses, Brentwood rockers, trees, undulating hills, and waves, as well as purely decorative patterns.
In Marples’s “Growth Patterns,” we learn that Asawa’s method of working outward from a central point in concen- tric rings or diverging branches to pro- duce mandala-like drawings first took shape in 1962, when friends returned from a trip to Death Valley with a gift to draw: a dried plant, bundled at the cen- ter, dividing outward. Haptically untan- gling what she saw came first; a series of tied-wire sculptures emerged before the artist translated onto paper or thin metal sheets what the wire had taught her. The works, Marples argues, reflect Asawa’s attentiveness to “radiating implications” (165) not only in nature but also within communities.
“Forms Within Forms” offers insight into how Asawa’s hanging sculptures relate to her drawing practice. Marples adduces a letter from Asawa’s fellow BMC alumnus Johnson in which he professes admiration for one of those sculptures, with its “forms within forms within forms” (103–104), after seeing it in the Laverne Originals showroom in Manhattan in 1952. Asawa herself traced the inspiration for her rippling sculptures in part to the curvilinear, nearly abstract, almost cell-like “Dancers” in drawings and watercolors she had made at BMC.
I originally became aware of Asawa in the 1980s because of her and Johnson’s shared affection for Josef and Anni Albers. (See also Mark Bloch, “Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray at David Zwirner,” Whitehot Magazine, November 2017.) As Kopp points out, Josef’s “Matiere” studies in which students created new contexts for found materials, were a defining exercise of BMC teachings, training students to see in unorthodox ways. In An Artist Takes Shape (58), a cartoon, Asawa wonders, “How can I trick the eye?,” observing, “when one digs beneath the fallen leaves, the distinction between leaves and earth is nearly gone.” The greatest strength of Through Line is its images: gorgeous, sumptuous, and impeccably printed in Italy, with at least one on every page spread. The choices in imagery hit the intellectual points admirably, making the continued turning of these pages irresistible. One small weakness of this tome’s essays, however, is their repetitiveness, not the fault of these gifted writers but inherent somehow in the book’s structure. The themes in the eight mini-essays are continually replucked, not only in the other seven mini-essays but also in the four foundational essays, to the point that the reader sometimes loses track of which chapter is which. For me, it muddied the clarity of the book’s arguments. In the end, though, every image is illuminated by every point in every text, not only made and remade but well-made.
Both An Artist Takes Shape and Through Line reveal how, despite her attentiveness to strong mentors, Asawa created her own terms. Art and life merged in her, transforming both, echoing the exploratory marks that dance, determinedly and effectively, across the works on paper discussed and illustrated in Through Line. An Artist Takes Shape and Through Line similarly obscure figure and ground, blending Ruth Asawa’s art with her life.
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Goings On for Artists is compiled weekly by Rohan Subramaniam, Archive Intern, Summer/Fall/Winter 2024/2025
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