reading

Honestly, I'm not sure what attracts me more to Ruth Asawa...the undulating shapes of her wire sculptures or the photos of her surrounded by her children as she works. Both Ruth's work + her life have an artistic quality about them that just seem to touch my soul. 

I've been thoroughly enjoying this book about Ruth's work + life. She training at Black Mountain College under Josef Albers who encouraged his students, "Open your eyes and see." Albers prized work and repetitive process over self-expression, believing that self-expression would be the natural outcome of the creative, hands-on process. Words + concepts like these make me stop reading often to write in my journal...and will inform my view of making art going forward. ​

I appreciate the thoughtful writing regarding the way Ruth's work has been seen more as craft or feminine handiwork than art. Helen Molesworth writes in her essay entitled "San Fransisco Housewife and Mother", "My hope is that feminist art history can begin to work toward a more sensitive hermeneutic, one striated with degrees of complexity about these matters. I crave a discipline capable of negotiating the systems of value that are cognizant of their sexist formation but not beholden to reiterating that sexism at every turn." (!!)

Molesworth says of this photo by Imogen Cunningham, "In Cunningham's picture the central female figure is neither allegorical, nor is she a 'typical' mother. She is neither exclusively concerned with her children, nor is her identity as an artist in any way at risk. Rather, what the picture makes abundantly clear is that Asawa fully inhabits the role of artist and mother with seeming ease, without sacrificing one modality to the other. This interests me deeply, for it seems to offer a way out of the impasse of thinking that motherhood (and by extension other forms of labor historically gendered female) is either antithetical to being an artist, or is not a form of labor equal to the labor of being an artist."

Amen.

Love,
Jane