Overview

This exquisite publication features Asawa's vibrant, experimental lithographs of subjects ranging from delicate flowers to members of her family, and is the first to present her complete portfolio made at the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop Over the course of just two months in 1965, at a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, the Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa produced a stunning portfolio of 54 lithographs, depicting organic forms and plants as well as family and friends. The Tamarind Workshop had been founded by artist June Wayne in Los Angeles in 1960 in an effort to revitalize lithography as a fine art, and offered artists the opportunity to work in collaboration with master printers. For Asawa, it was a rare chance to focus on a single medium and opened up a new chapter of artmaking for her. A testament to Asawa's radically experimental and collaborative ethos, the Tamarind prints present a discrete chapter of her oeuvre, encapsulating many of the artist's emblematic motifs. Published in celebration of the artist's centennial in 2026, this exquisitely produced book illustrates each lithograph made during her residency at the Tamarind Workshop, which have never been published as a complete series.

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9781633451872

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Reviews

A sweeping MoMA retrospective shows the full scope and ambition of Ruth Asawa, a titanic talent who studied with luminaries like Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, yet wasn't fully discovered until her death in 2013. As the art world approaches her centennial, the appreciation is still growing.--Marion Maneker ""Puck"" In Asawa's hands, wire was transformed from an instrument of imprisonment into a lifeline, a route to imaginative freedom. She created a world in which forms brim and bloom and multiply without end. As much as that of any artist, Asawa's work affirms the power of art to allow us to begin anew.--Deborah Solomon ""The New York Times"" Rare are the shows that reveal a bona fide masterpiece to the public; the Museum of Modern Art's rich, fascinating Wifredo Lam retrospective is one of them.--Alex Greenberger ""ARTnews"" That's how the MoMA exhibition feels [...] like gliding through a landscape of infinite variety and coherence. Her large-scale sculptures made of woven wire have an almost sensual intimacy; her tiniest sketches of hydrangeas hint at cosmic events. Drawings of blooms snipped from the garden or offered as bouquets have the vividness of portraits. They buzz with emotion.--Ariella Budick ""The Finanical Times"" The retrospective builds on this incredible momentum, presenting the full arc of her career and its many facets.--Sarah Cascone ""Artnet""

Author Information

Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) studied at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s before moving to San Francisco in 1949, where she produced a celebrated body of work that ranged from intricate wire sculptures to calligraphic ink paintings. Asawa continuously transformed materials and objects into subjects of sustained artistic contemplation, drawing on nature, science, and craft to unsettle distinctions between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, and negative and positive space. Cara Manes is an Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Dominika Tylcz is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.

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