Beauty Felt, Not Seen: Ruth Asawa's Looped-Wire Sculptures at Midcentury

Ruth Asawa’s absence from canonical narratives of American modernism until her posthumous ascendance in the contemporary art world has been largely attributed to her status as a Japanese American woman, mother, and educator, whose identities were overlooked by art history during her lifetime. However, this paper argues that a significant reason that Asawa’s work was critically disregarded at midcentury was for its beauty. When Asawa exhibited her looped-wire sculptures in galleries in New York and San Francisco during the 1950s-60s, critics often described her work as beautiful, noting their indescribably delicate qualities and the feminine presence of their curvaceous, orb-like forms. Through close readings of Asawa’s critical reception along with her work’s exhibition history, I suggest that the perceived beauty of Asawa’s sculptures manifested racially charged ideas about the historical relation of the Asian female body to aesthetics. Her sculptures, often read as craft, design, or decoration, were thus placed outside the realm of art and its critical discourses at a time when, as the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman described, the project of modernism was to destroy beauty, not create it. That her sculptures were seen as categorically beautiful obscured the ways in which Asawa’s sculptural process attended to the phenomenological experience of beauty, posing an alternate relationship between the Asian female body, beauty, and notions of artistic agency. This paper considers beauty as an artistic method and a mode of interpretation and inquiry for Asawa’s work to expand potential discursive pathways for examining Asian diasporic feminist artistic practices.