Everything She Touched
Metadata
Highlights
- Crafting beauty from cast-off materials—a byproduct of scarcity—was another lifelong habit. As a little girl, Ruth would unwind the fine wires used to bundle vegetables and refashion them into bracelets and rings, studding them with a red bead she imagined as a ruby. She reveled in found objects, scrounging supplies and recycling trash into treasures. (Location 285)
- Men pounded soft glutinous rice to make rice balls known as mochi, eaten on special occasions. These were cooked in steamers that the inmates built from scrap wood and metal scavenged around camp. For a special taste of home, rumor had it that some of the older men either imported or built a sake still to make bootleg liquor. (Location 537)
- Albers brought Bauhaus values of functionality and beauty to Black Mountain. He exhibited humility toward materials and never threw anything away. In Germany, he had crafted stunning stained glass windows from green bottle shards and scrap metal, achieving an alchemy of craft and economy of means that Ruth admired. (Location 1000)
- But his core values—learning to see things anew, developing technique through eye-hand coordination, working with everyday objects—all resonated with Ruth. (Location 1005)
- Design problems posed by Albers included balancing figure and background, giving equal attention to the form in positive space and the empty or negative space that surrounds and defines it. He also would assign drawings of curved planes or intersecting lines, asking the students to show which one is on top and “indicate the air between by making air, not by touching.” Writing one’s name backward in the air was assigned to sharpen the coordination of eye, hand, and brain. Exercises in mirror writing and mirror drawing flowed from that. Students also were challenged to draw a Coca-Cola or cigarette logo from memory. (Location 1014)
- “Draw what you see, not what you know.” (Location 1023)
- One of Albers’s signature lessons, matière studies asked students to focus on the visual qualities of a material that could look like something else—a trompe l’oeil to trick or, as he said in his accented English, “schwindle” the eye. (Location 1025)
- Ruth observed that the texture of sun-dried cow manure resembled Ry-Krisp. Elaine Schmitt gamely fetched a glistening pile of cow intestines for her study. Mary Parks beat soapsuds into a white froth identical to egg whites. Albers, making rounds in class with his ruler in hand, stung her by saying that she didn’t look at it correctly. Schmitt wrote home that friends celebrated her birthday with a faux feast in which a stone posed as meat loaf, and crowned her as the class’s “matière momma.” (Location 1030)
- “Let the material express itself.” “Don’t bring your ego with you.” “Heartbeat of paper.” (Location 1042)
- One of the problems that he gave in school, was never to see anything in isolation; that you can define space and you can define an object by defining the space around it. (Location 1056)
- At lunch, Ruth remembered, Anni was constantly wiping her hands with alcohol, while Josef savored the local mangoes. Ruth wrote, “He went into ecstasy while eating a whole one.” (Location 1159)
- Mexico’s gift to Ruth was this exposure to basket weaving, which enabled her to use wire to draw in three-dimensional space. Her alchemy was to take this material, which also had been used by the military to build camp fences, and transform it into art. (Location 1177)
- “Wire can play,” (Location 1184)
- Cross-fertilization of the arts let painters dance, sculptors sing, and poets make pottery. Ruth and Rauschenberg performed in an uninhibited student production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which called for them to run down a hill in primitive costumes bearing torches. Seeing Rauschenberg dance in a loincloth, Ruth relished the playful side of her fellow artists. (Location 1255)
- “It was like spreading the wings of a dragonfly to see what made it move,” Ruth wrote to Albert upon her arrival back at the college on October 23. “I didn’t understand it but such beauty unfolded.” (Location 1404)
- Ruth, love me as you are tender to plants, as you love coils of beautiful wire, as you love loneliness—knowing that time will wear rough edges smooth—that distance is surmountable—that wire is stronger than stone—that God is good and God is love. (Location 1533)
- I dance all of the time, and love all of the movements which are possible. Albers calls me “biological” in color class. The peepers are crying, singing; I am awaking at 5:45 a.m. to catch the morning sun at the farm. Everything I do, I love; (Location 1642)
- LOFT (Location 1678)
- Note: Well in a twist of either divine retribution or comic relief , i got laid off today
- Ruth worked nonstop, sculpting at night after her family was asleep, or rising before dawn to complete a piece. “Insomnia,” she once wrote to Albert from Black Mountain, “is nothing more than a fear of losing time.” (Location 1877)
- The tiny show in a cabaret made an imperceptible splash in the wider world of art, but it introduced Ruth’s work to Tolk-Watkins’s circle of sophisticated club-goers. It included the heir to the Matson shipping line, William Matson Roth, who fancied Ruth’s style and paved the way for her debut in public art commissions in the next decade. (Location 1894)
- Laverne proposed that Ruth mass-produce her pieces as functional and decorative accessories to coordinate with their interior design pieces, in much the same way that Knoll was marketing Harry Bertoia sculptures and chairs. Laverne even wanted to know if Ruth could make wastebaskets. To boost production, the company offered to hire Ruth a housekeeper and nanny, which would free her from domestic duties so she could focus on her output. But that was not her vision. Ruth declined the offer, resisting the pull of a commercial contract that came with strings attached. (Location 1902)
- Ruth worked in her studio, located in a playroom. Xavier remembered not being told, “Don’t do this; don’t do that.” Rather he would be advised, “Try it.” (Location 1955)
- Noguchi and Asawa share one quality of Oriental art that Western artists often lack: economy of means. Their Japanese ancestors devoted vast efforts to making a single brush stroke look easy. By confining themselves to simple shapes made of patted mud and woven wire respectively, Noguchi and Asawa also achieved a pleasing quality of ease and oneness with their work. Judged by one standard test of art, i.e. the proportion of visible effort to effect, their sculptures stand high. (Location 2018)
- The master plan of the home, studio, and garden fulfilled Ruth’s dream of merging a family home and a working artist’s studio with an urban garden. The house became the hub of activity that satisfied her needs—now increasingly inseparable—to make art and to rear her children under one roof, with Albert as chief engineer and architect. (Location 2248)
- For the entrance, Ruth began carving massive redwood double doors with an abstract design of interlocking waves and whorls, a pattern reminiscent of Albers’s design class exercises known as “meanders.” She let each of her children work at carving curls, so they contributed their hands to part of the whole. (Location 2268)
- I think that’s what Albers was saying. He wasn’t interested in making artists out of us. He was interested in making us see, look. It’s hard to define that. It’s hard to say what it was that he gave us, but I think it shaped me because, I had endured the internment and the discrimination before when Asians couldn’t become citizens and they couldn’t own property. I mean, all that happened before the war. Then during the war, we were interned, and we just went like sheep. You know, we followed. We were told to do this, so we did it. Then, suddenly, you come to a place like Black Mountain, and they say, “What are you thinking?” … Every moment they were asking. It was very hard. But I think the experience made me understand what to work on… . You can’t work on how you were treated in camp and as a child in the Depression … You have to deal with what is unfair now. So, I had the choice of going to New York and building a career, making a name for myself, getting an exhibit, getting a gallery, getting all of that. Or I had to decide being a parent what I had to deal with what was at hand. (Location 2356)
- Dining out might be limited to Chinese banquets a couple times a year. But they were rich in art, tools, and projects everywhere. (Location 2436)
- In her letter to the foundation, Wayne explained that Ruth’s gift was her power to transform, like an alchemist, the most humble of materials—from wire to flour and salt dough—into art of transcendent freshness and purity. “Anything she touches” becomes art, Wayne wrote. “She could make art of a mud puddle if she wished to.” (Location 2592)
- The Lanier children respected their mother’s pursuits. Ruth set no walls between life and work; she wanted them to observe her making sculpture as naturally as making dinner. (Location 2609)
- Once she got an idea, Ruth was tenacious; she was not to be denied. When she assigned Valley Girl Judy Burns to learn and then teach the craft of macramé, it got done. “She was a quiet mover,” said Burns. “Like water moving over a rock.” (Location 2653)
- I shall gamble with the young, since they will truly inherit all of the good and bad that we adults produce. (Location 2692)
- In Ruth’s vision, art went hand in hand with gardens as a tool for enriching the curriculum, beautifying the school, and teaching responsibility for tending a project—be it a sculpture or a flower. She argued that plants could be used to teach science, botany, poetry, and drawing. (Location 2760)
- Ruth stretched the use of scant space. After dividing up a small garden patch into a grid, she then created a paper map of the same plot for each class and grade, over and over, marking each square with a child’s name, as if it were exclusively theirs. It was not. (Location 2787)
- “Buy bulbs—flower bulbs—because when the flower comes up and blooms, it gives you its new life.” (Location 2798)
- The constant stream of visitors to the house in Noe Valley, old and young, were drafted into working on the project too, and invited to grab a ball of dough and start modeling. Ruth wanted the fountain figures to differ in style and texture, to reflect the work of many hands. (Location 3076)
- As the fountain’s work got back on schedule, Ruth invited more friends and neighbors to model clay figures, turning the project into a massive collaboration. Joining Ruth, Sally, Mae, and Aiko were about one hundred neighborhood volunteers aged three to eighty-eight, who would stop by the studio to make baker’s clay figures and scenes for the fountain. Ruth liked the collective artistry of large works, from murals to medieval cathedrals, in which many craftsmen would contribute and feel a sense of communal ownership. (Location 3090)
- This process—“the dance of the pour”—mesmerized Ruth: the slow-motion teamwork of the foundry workers, the danger and beauty of the blazing liquid bronze, the heat waves felt by viewers standing yards away. (Location 3119)
- I remember Imogen most for being able to turn frugality and poverty into meaningful elegance. She taught me that poverty is a state of mind, that is you’re poor only if you dwell on it. That in child rearing the artist can still create by observing what is around them, children, plants, and making images that can be savored when we are old. Our last real visit with Imogen was coming back from Guerneville. She nodded off to sleep in the front seat of the car. She turned to Albert and said, “I think I am getting old.” Albert’s reply: “Well, you’re entitled to it.” (Location 3170)
- Ruth, who sketched every bouquet sent by well-wishers, had also brought origami papers, practicing her craft with fingers that now were numb. In a trick that delighted visitors, Ruth folded an origami paper camera, concealing inside a tiny sketch of her visitor. When they came to her bedside she would pretend to take their picture, and—click—out came the “photo.” (Location 3516)
- After ushering the children around the city, she brought them to her home studio, to view her ceiling full of woven wire sculptures and the walls peopled with life masks of her family, friends, and colleagues. The kids were incredulous: Did she do all that? “If any of you want to become an artist, I’ll tell you it’s a lot of work. But it’s fun all the time,” said Asawa, (Location 3626)
- “Asawa, in her typical populist manner,” wrote the reporter, “collected autographs from the workers who gave her one-ton panels such tender loving care.” (Location 3642)
- “Ruth … was shrewd but very elf-like, like a cloud. Razor-sharp perception about what was real and what was phony… . She would bounce around, graceful, joyous, innocent but not innocent. She wore her heart on her shoulder, but if anything was out of line she’d call it. She knew who she was.” (Location 3867)
- She was simple. Afraid of taking my time. Showed me a drawing once out in the parking lot—a structural engineering drawing—she opened it up outside and I had to open the truck. It was so funny… . Some artists don’t want to share their art. She was never afraid to give away anything. (Location 4023)
- How time flies. I am busier today than ever before working on my own work, and I am grateful to have lived to enjoy it. (Location 4103)
- I’ve spent my life making what was needed and what I wanted one and the same: in marriage, in raising a family, making fountains, or talking to a child. The investment has paid off for me: A loving husband of forty-nine years, my children and grandchildren living close to me, and I’m able to share my work with the community. What more can I ask? (Location 4148)
- Photographer Terry Schmitt recalled one day when Ruth insisted on doing yard work in spite of problems with balance: Working later, the lupus took its toll. We were over at Alvarado pulling weeds, and she would pull some, then she’d sort of gently topple over. She’d lie there, lie on ground and pull all the weeds within reach and move to a new spot to topple over and pull weeds. (Location 4247)
- I remember warm summer days and campfire nights. I remember flour salt and water all over the place. Pulling weeds and planting gardens. Endless board games and Adam’s messy room. I remember wire and tools & sun lighted rooms where we as children lived out a magical childhood. The long dinner tables—listening to Albert’s stories and having good meals. I remember art in every corner of the rooms. Riding the back of the truck—and at night watching the stars, sleeping outside, trading monster stories with Adam. Watching your example of Nature. And learning to respect it. While the outside world changed and became harsh [it] seemed hardly visible to me. The many experiences help me remember—and retain a faith in nature and vision of art the world does not always appreciate. I took for granted all people were of this nature—as in the days of my childhood [with] Adam & family… . thanks for all that. (Location 4384)
- There is no public memorial marking Ruth’s grave. She had other ideas. Following her wishes, her son Paul mingled Ruth and Albert’s ashes together with those of their son Adam, and folded them into clay. From that clay, Paul created a series of ceramic pieces, one for each of his siblings. Each is different. All are crafted in a simple, rustic style, respecting his mother’s Japanese American roots. True to her teacher Albers, Ruth made sure her earthly matter was not destroyed but rather transformed until, in the end, Ruth Asawa herself became a work of art. (Location 4661)
title: “Everything She Touched”
author: “Marilyn Chase”
url: ""
date: 2023-12-19
source: kindle
tags: media/books
Everything She Touched
Metadata
Highlights
- Crafting beauty from cast-off materials—a byproduct of scarcity—was another lifelong habit. As a little girl, Ruth would unwind the fine wires used to bundle vegetables and refashion them into bracelets and rings, studding them with a red bead she imagined as a ruby. She reveled in found objects, scrounging supplies and recycling trash into treasures. (Location 285)
- Men pounded soft glutinous rice to make rice balls known as mochi, eaten on special occasions. These were cooked in steamers that the inmates built from scrap wood and metal scavenged around camp. For a special taste of home, rumor had it that some of the older men either imported or built a sake still to make bootleg liquor. (Location 537)
- Albers brought Bauhaus values of functionality and beauty to Black Mountain. He exhibited humility toward materials and never threw anything away. In Germany, he had crafted stunning stained glass windows from green bottle shards and scrap metal, achieving an alchemy of craft and economy of means that Ruth admired. (Location 1000)
- But his core values—learning to see things anew, developing technique through eye-hand coordination, working with everyday objects—all resonated with Ruth. (Location 1005)
- Design problems posed by Albers included balancing figure and background, giving equal attention to the form in positive space and the empty or negative space that surrounds and defines it. He also would assign drawings of curved planes or intersecting lines, asking the students to show which one is on top and “indicate the air between by making air, not by touching.” Writing one’s name backward in the air was assigned to sharpen the coordination of eye, hand, and brain. Exercises in mirror writing and mirror drawing flowed from that. Students also were challenged to draw a Coca-Cola or cigarette logo from memory. (Location 1014)
- “Draw what you see, not what you know.” (Location 1023)
- One of Albers’s signature lessons, matière studies asked students to focus on the visual qualities of a material that could look like something else—a trompe l’oeil to trick or, as he said in his accented English, “schwindle” the eye. (Location 1025)
- Ruth observed that the texture of sun-dried cow manure resembled Ry-Krisp. Elaine Schmitt gamely fetched a glistening pile of cow intestines for her study. Mary Parks beat soapsuds into a white froth identical to egg whites. Albers, making rounds in class with his ruler in hand, stung her by saying that she didn’t look at it correctly. Schmitt wrote home that friends celebrated her birthday with a faux feast in which a stone posed as meat loaf, and crowned her as the class’s “matière momma.” (Location 1030)
- “Let the material express itself.” “Don’t bring your ego with you.” “Heartbeat of paper.” (Location 1042)
- One of the problems that he gave in school, was never to see anything in isolation; that you can define space and you can define an object by defining the space around it. (Location 1056)
- At lunch, Ruth remembered, Anni was constantly wiping her hands with alcohol, while Josef savored the local mangoes. Ruth wrote, “He went into ecstasy while eating a whole one.” (Location 1159)
- Mexico’s gift to Ruth was this exposure to basket weaving, which enabled her to use wire to draw in three-dimensional space. Her alchemy was to take this material, which also had been used by the military to build camp fences, and transform it into art. (Location 1177)
- “Wire can play,” (Location 1184)
- Cross-fertilization of the arts let painters dance, sculptors sing, and poets make pottery. Ruth and Rauschenberg performed in an uninhibited student production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which called for them to run down a hill in primitive costumes bearing torches. Seeing Rauschenberg dance in a loincloth, Ruth relished the playful side of her fellow artists. (Location 1255)
- “It was like spreading the wings of a dragonfly to see what made it move,” Ruth wrote to Albert upon her arrival back at the college on October 23. “I didn’t understand it but such beauty unfolded.” (Location 1404)
- Ruth, love me as you are tender to plants, as you love coils of beautiful wire, as you love loneliness—knowing that time will wear rough edges smooth—that distance is surmountable—that wire is stronger than stone—that God is good and God is love. (Location 1533)
- I dance all of the time, and love all of the movements which are possible. Albers calls me “biological” in color class. The peepers are crying, singing; I am awaking at 5:45 a.m. to catch the morning sun at the farm. Everything I do, I love; (Location 1642)
- LOFT (Location 1678)
- Note: Well in a twist of either divine retribution or comic relief , i got laid off today
- Ruth worked nonstop, sculpting at night after her family was asleep, or rising before dawn to complete a piece. “Insomnia,” she once wrote to Albert from Black Mountain, “is nothing more than a fear of losing time.” (Location 1877)
- The tiny show in a cabaret made an imperceptible splash in the wider world of art, but it introduced Ruth’s work to Tolk-Watkins’s circle of sophisticated club-goers. It included the heir to the Matson shipping line, William Matson Roth, who fancied Ruth’s style and paved the way for her debut in public art commissions in the next decade. (Location 1894)
- Laverne proposed that Ruth mass-produce her pieces as functional and decorative accessories to coordinate with their interior design pieces, in much the same way that Knoll was marketing Harry Bertoia sculptures and chairs. Laverne even wanted to know if Ruth could make wastebaskets. To boost production, the company offered to hire Ruth a housekeeper and nanny, which would free her from domestic duties so she could focus on her output. But that was not her vision. Ruth declined the offer, resisting the pull of a commercial contract that came with strings attached. (Location 1902)
- Ruth worked in her studio, located in a playroom. Xavier remembered not being told, “Don’t do this; don’t do that.” Rather he would be advised, “Try it.” (Location 1955)
- Noguchi and Asawa share one quality of Oriental art that Western artists often lack: economy of means. Their Japanese ancestors devoted vast efforts to making a single brush stroke look easy. By confining themselves to simple shapes made of patted mud and woven wire respectively, Noguchi and Asawa also achieved a pleasing quality of ease and oneness with their work. Judged by one standard test of art, i.e. the proportion of visible effort to effect, their sculptures stand high. (Location 2018)
- The master plan of the home, studio, and garden fulfilled Ruth’s dream of merging a family home and a working artist’s studio with an urban garden. The house became the hub of activity that satisfied her needs—now increasingly inseparable—to make art and to rear her children under one roof, with Albert as chief engineer and architect. (Location 2248)
- For the entrance, Ruth began carving massive redwood double doors with an abstract design of interlocking waves and whorls, a pattern reminiscent of Albers’s design class exercises known as “meanders.” She let each of her children work at carving curls, so they contributed their hands to part of the whole. (Location 2268)
- I think that’s what Albers was saying. He wasn’t interested in making artists out of us. He was interested in making us see, look. It’s hard to define that. It’s hard to say what it was that he gave us, but I think it shaped me because, I had endured the internment and the discrimination before when Asians couldn’t become citizens and they couldn’t own property. I mean, all that happened before the war. Then during the war, we were interned, and we just went like sheep. You know, we followed. We were told to do this, so we did it. Then, suddenly, you come to a place like Black Mountain, and they say, “What are you thinking?” … Every moment they were asking. It was very hard. But I think the experience made me understand what to work on… . You can’t work on how you were treated in camp and as a child in the Depression … You have to deal with what is unfair now. So, I had the choice of going to New York and building a career, making a name for myself, getting an exhibit, getting a gallery, getting all of that. Or I had to decide being a parent what I had to deal with what was at hand. (Location 2356)
- Dining out might be limited to Chinese banquets a couple times a year. But they were rich in art, tools, and projects everywhere. (Location 2436)
- In her letter to the foundation, Wayne explained that Ruth’s gift was her power to transform, like an alchemist, the most humble of materials—from wire to flour and salt dough—into art of transcendent freshness and purity. “Anything she touches” becomes art, Wayne wrote. “She could make art of a mud puddle if she wished to.” (Location 2592)
- The Lanier children respected their mother’s pursuits. Ruth set no walls between life and work; she wanted them to observe her making sculpture as naturally as making dinner. (Location 2609)
- Once she got an idea, Ruth was tenacious; she was not to be denied. When she assigned Valley Girl Judy Burns to learn and then teach the craft of macramé, it got done. “She was a quiet mover,” said Burns. “Like water moving over a rock.” (Location 2653)
- I shall gamble with the young, since they will truly inherit all of the good and bad that we adults produce. (Location 2692)
- In Ruth’s vision, art went hand in hand with gardens as a tool for enriching the curriculum, beautifying the school, and teaching responsibility for tending a project—be it a sculpture or a flower. She argued that plants could be used to teach science, botany, poetry, and drawing. (Location 2760)
- Ruth stretched the use of scant space. After dividing up a small garden patch into a grid, she then created a paper map of the same plot for each class and grade, over and over, marking each square with a child’s name, as if it were exclusively theirs. It was not. (Location 2787)
- “Buy bulbs—flower bulbs—because when the flower comes up and blooms, it gives you its new life.” (Location 2798)
- The constant stream of visitors to the house in Noe Valley, old and young, were drafted into working on the project too, and invited to grab a ball of dough and start modeling. Ruth wanted the fountain figures to differ in style and texture, to reflect the work of many hands. (Location 3076)
- As the fountain’s work got back on schedule, Ruth invited more friends and neighbors to model clay figures, turning the project into a massive collaboration. Joining Ruth, Sally, Mae, and Aiko were about one hundred neighborhood volunteers aged three to eighty-eight, who would stop by the studio to make baker’s clay figures and scenes for the fountain. Ruth liked the collective artistry of large works, from murals to medieval cathedrals, in which many craftsmen would contribute and feel a sense of communal ownership. (Location 3090)
- This process—“the dance of the pour”—mesmerized Ruth: the slow-motion teamwork of the foundry workers, the danger and beauty of the blazing liquid bronze, the heat waves felt by viewers standing yards away. (Location 3119)
- I remember Imogen most for being able to turn frugality and poverty into meaningful elegance. She taught me that poverty is a state of mind, that is you’re poor only if you dwell on it. That in child rearing the artist can still create by observing what is around them, children, plants, and making images that can be savored when we are old. Our last real visit with Imogen was coming back from Guerneville. She nodded off to sleep in the front seat of the car. She turned to Albert and said, “I think I am getting old.” Albert’s reply: “Well, you’re entitled to it.” (Location 3170)
- Ruth, who sketched every bouquet sent by well-wishers, had also brought origami papers, practicing her craft with fingers that now were numb. In a trick that delighted visitors, Ruth folded an origami paper camera, concealing inside a tiny sketch of her visitor. When they came to her bedside she would pretend to take their picture, and—click—out came the “photo.” (Location 3516)
- After ushering the children around the city, she brought them to her home studio, to view her ceiling full of woven wire sculptures and the walls peopled with life masks of her family, friends, and colleagues. The kids were incredulous: Did she do all that? “If any of you want to become an artist, I’ll tell you it’s a lot of work. But it’s fun all the time,” said Asawa, (Location 3626)
- “Asawa, in her typical populist manner,” wrote the reporter, “collected autographs from the workers who gave her one-ton panels such tender loving care.” (Location 3642)
- “Ruth … was shrewd but very elf-like, like a cloud. Razor-sharp perception about what was real and what was phony… . She would bounce around, graceful, joyous, innocent but not innocent. She wore her heart on her shoulder, but if anything was out of line she’d call it. She knew who she was.” (Location 3867)
- She was simple. Afraid of taking my time. Showed me a drawing once out in the parking lot—a structural engineering drawing—she opened it up outside and I had to open the truck. It was so funny… . Some artists don’t want to share their art. She was never afraid to give away anything. (Location 4023)
- How time flies. I am busier today than ever before working on my own work, and I am grateful to have lived to enjoy it. (Location 4103)
- I’ve spent my life making what was needed and what I wanted one and the same: in marriage, in raising a family, making fountains, or talking to a child. The investment has paid off for me: A loving husband of forty-nine years, my children and grandchildren living close to me, and I’m able to share my work with the community. What more can I ask? (Location 4148)
- Photographer Terry Schmitt recalled one day when Ruth insisted on doing yard work in spite of problems with balance: Working later, the lupus took its toll. We were over at Alvarado pulling weeds, and she would pull some, then she’d sort of gently topple over. She’d lie there, lie on ground and pull all the weeds within reach and move to a new spot to topple over and pull weeds. (Location 4247)
- I remember warm summer days and campfire nights. I remember flour salt and water all over the place. Pulling weeds and planting gardens. Endless board games and Adam’s messy room. I remember wire and tools & sun lighted rooms where we as children lived out a magical childhood. The long dinner tables—listening to Albert’s stories and having good meals. I remember art in every corner of the rooms. Riding the back of the truck—and at night watching the stars, sleeping outside, trading monster stories with Adam. Watching your example of Nature. And learning to respect it. While the outside world changed and became harsh [it] seemed hardly visible to me. The many experiences help me remember—and retain a faith in nature and vision of art the world does not always appreciate. I took for granted all people were of this nature—as in the days of my childhood [with] Adam & family… . thanks for all that. (Location 4384)
- There is no public memorial marking Ruth’s grave. She had other ideas. Following her wishes, her son Paul mingled Ruth and Albert’s ashes together with those of their son Adam, and folded them into clay. From that clay, Paul created a series of ceramic pieces, one for each of his siblings. Each is different. All are crafted in a simple, rustic style, respecting his mother’s Japanese American roots. True to her teacher Albers, Ruth made sure her earthly matter was not destroyed but rather transformed until, in the end, Ruth Asawa herself became a work of art. (Location 4661)