It’s curious to consider what Asawa would think of this turn of events; she would likely not be surprised that her career was difficult to categorize. She was born in 1926 to Japanese parents in Norwalk, California, now a part of the greater Los Angeles area. She was the fourth of seven children, all of whom were expected to work on the family’s farm, which they rented because immigrants, at the time, were legally prohibited from owning land in the state. On Saturdays, the children attended Japanese school, where they studied calligraphy. To Asawa, each brushstroke was “a dance.”

“We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment,” Asawa told an interviewer. “We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within the forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.”

After Pearl Harbor, Asawa’s father purged their home of Japanese mementos, fearing undue attention from neighbors and the authorities, burying martial-arts equipment in the backyard and burning books about ikebana, traditional Japanese flower arrangement. The tactic didn’t work: He was arrested in 1942 and sent to a Justice Department camp in New Mexico. Asawa wouldn’t see her father again for six years. Soon, the siblings and their mother were interned at the Santa Anita racetrack, where they slept in the haphazardly converted horse stables. While there, Asawa studied drawing with a trio of detained Walt Disney animators, Tom Okamoto, Chris Ishii, and James Tanaka.

After six months, the family was uprooted again and sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. Asawa was able to achieve a semblance of normalcy there; she was even voted her grade’s “most “artistic” girl. High-school graduation qualified Asawa for early release from internment, and a Quaker scholarship allowed her to enroll at the Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1943. In her third year, Asawa was told she would not be able to complete her degree, with the stated reason being that a student teacher of Japanese heritage would not be safe in local schools.

Two of her friends from Milwaukee, the artists Ray Johnson and Elaine Schmitt, invited Asawa to spend the summer of 1946 in North Carolina to take a summer course at an arts college in the state’s foothills. Founded in 1933, Black Mountain College was a short-lived but influential experiment in interdisciplinary arts education. Today, it’s associated with a who’s who of postwar talent in both fine art and literature: Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Charles Olson, and more. There were no course requirements or grades at the school, and graduation was optional; only a rare few obtained a formal degree. Students farmed their own food, built their own furniture, and lived communally with their teachers. The attitude that “more is less” was a philosophical gesture as much as a necessary frugality, for the school was often strapped for cash and resources.

Asawa enrolled as a full-time student at Black Mountain College in the fall of 1946. She was especially drawn to Josef Albers, who ran the art program. Albers and his wife, Anni, a German-Jewish textile artist, had been invited to teach ahead of the college’s inaugural year, after the Nazi regime forced the closure of the Berlin Bauhaus. With a core value of “contact with material,” Albers brought the Bauhaus to Black Mountain. He assigned students simple exercises that promoted observation, articulation, and discipline: fold a piece of paper every way possible; draw a continuous meandering line; change the texture of an item.

These formal values resonated with Asawa, and while working in the school’s laundry room, she got the idea to experiment with the rubber stamps used to identify folded bedsheets. Using stamps marked “double sheet” and “BMC,” she repeatedly applied the ink in different patterns: zig-zags, starbursts, and pinwheels, with the natural fading of the pigment producing an organic design of its own. In one large work from the late 1940s, she flipped the orientation of the stamp to create mirrored, overlapping rows and, in turn, transformed the letters into new shapes.

In the summer of 1947, Asawa visited the Alberses during their sabbatical in Mexico. While in the village of Toluca, she was captivated by the technique used to make wire egg baskets, and a local teacher taught her to loop the metal by hand. “Wire can play,” Asawa wrote in her notebook, and she was soon transforming strands of copper, brass, or steel into shapes that she took to calling “continuous form within a form.”

When school resumed in the fall, she met Albert Lanier, a Southern architect. The pair started dating, and in 1949 Asawa joined Lanier in San Francisco. The couple were wed just nine months after California legalized interracial marriage. Between 1950 and 1959, Asawa and Lanier’s family grew to include six children, two of whom were adopted.

In those years, the artist-mother was an anomaly: The pram in the hall was still seen as an impediment to good art, and there was only one persona—artist. Women artists, more often than not, were faced with a series of either/ors: freedom versus distraction; obsessive versus hobbyist; creation versus procreation. Asawa was certainly aware of these competing loyalties, which the painter Alice Neel once called “the awful dichotomy.”

And yet Asawa rejected such conventions and soon settled into a rhythm between caretaking and art-making. When she was working on a large-scale sculpture, she hung it from a hook in the door frame between the living room and kitchen so she could keep an eye on her children, whose own artwork filled the home. Her first recorded sale was to Laverne Originals, a design company that displayed Asawa’s hanging wire sculptures and paper-fold screens in showrooms in San Francisco and New York. This exposure led to placements in the pages of Vogue and on the cover of Arts & Architecture.

At the same time, Asawa dabbled in mass production. In 1952, she sold three textile patterns, including a reworked version of the “BMC” stamp, which became printed fabric for mattress covers. That same year, Laverne Originals offered Asawa a long-term contract to produce functional and decorative accessories—i.e., looped-wire wastebaskets. She considered the idea, responding: “I am interested in producing to sell, but the more I work the more ideas I get and I want to experiment, but experimenting is not producing.” In the end, Asawa rejected the proposal, which included a company-provided nanny, and decided to focus on her personal art instead.

In late 1953, her work caught the eye of the New York dealer Louis Pollack, whose Peridot Gallery represented Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, and Constantin Brancusi. Asawa’s hanging forms were featured in a trio of solo shows at the gallery and included in exhibitions at the Biennial de São Paulo, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the SFMOMA). The exposure resulted in a handful of significant sales: Asawa’s sculptures were acquired by major collectors, including MoMA, the architect Philip Johnson, and multiple Rockefellers.

Asawa’s critical reception was positive, but it frequently featured a dismissive asterisk regarding the artist’s identity and chosen medium. A 1955 Time article, offensively titled “Eastern Yeast,” praised recent exhibitions by Isamu Noguchi and Asawa, though the former is described as a “leading U.S. sculptor” while Asawa is a “housewife and mother of three.” In addition to domesticating Asawa, the piece exoticized the pair as “Oriental” artists, overlooking the influence of European modernism on both.

Meanwhile, works that were warmly received in design circles were often met with confusion in a fine-art context. “They are beautiful if primarily only decorative objects in space,” The New York Times wrote of Asawa’s “chain mail” technique in 1956. The art/craft divide was further complicated by the invocation of feminine handiwork by critics and by Asawa herself, who described her work using words like “woven,” “knitting,” and “crocheting.” “It wasn’t stone, it wasn’t welded steel, it wasn’t traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art,” Asawa recalled. “They couldn’t define it in the 1950s when I was starting out.”

Asawa parted ways with Peridot in 1958; it was expensive to ship sculptures across the country, and she’d long been constrained by the limits of the gallery’s eight-foot-high ceilings. For the next several years, she would largely abstain from the commercial art world as she “invested” in her family and city. Her sketchbook was a constant companion, and her children were recurring characters. Her son Paul is depicted in both spindly contour drawings and ones that use a carved marker to create textural cross-hatchings, as seen in Untitled (FF.1234, Paul Lanier on a Blanket) (1962–63). She filled notebooks with sketches of garden cuttings and transformed these pages into vibrant prints at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1965. (She was said to sleep only four hours a night.)

It was Asawa’s difficulty in drawing a specific desert plant, a gift from a friend, that led to a new body of work in the 1960s. The plant’s structure was too intricate to render on paper, so she turned to wire. She “bent, tied, and divided” the wires into treelike sculptures; some wires stand pin-straight, like pine, while others are allowed to coil back onto themselves, a flexible memory. “Nature is my teacher, and I have used materials that are a product of our 20th century to study her growth patterns,” Asawa wrote in a 1968 letter.

That same year, she began a new initiative that would define the second half of her life. When her children entered the local Alvarado Elementary School, Asawa was disappointed by the paint-by-number photocopies that passed as art class. She and a fellow parent, Sally B. Woodbridge, an architectural historian, cofounded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop. The classes were taught by artist-mothers, in accordance with the Black Mountain tenet that practicing artists make the best teachers. A mimeographed booklet, produced by the workshop and titled Milk Carton Sculpture, was on display at MoMA and outlined how lunchtime trash could offer lessons in recycling, mathematics, and sculpture.

In Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury, art historian Jordan Troeller underlines the subversive radicalness of the Alvarado Workshop. “The artist-mothers’ involvement in the San Francisco schools radically expands what we now think of as conventional markers of countercultural practices,” she writes. These ladies weren’t burning their bras; they directly intervened in the education system. “We as a City once vaunted as ‘the City who knows how’ must try to discover not how to drop out, but to tune in and use that fresh energy that is loose in our young people,” Asawa wrote in the San Francisco Examiner in 1969. And unlike the city’s legendary “Happenings,” the Alvarado Workshop stuck around for more than a moment, lasting from 1968 to 1982. At its peak, the workshop spread to more than 50 public schools in San Francisco and inspired similar initiatives across the city. At the same time, Asawa and her circle were part of a “prefeminist generation” of women artists who did not thematize their identity as maternal or domestic figures. But as Troeller notes, though Asawa “never claimed a feminist politics…her choice of materials, her decision to work at home, and her willingness to be identified as a mother at a time when such a move equated to self-erasure attest to a feminist orientation of her practice as an artist.”

Asawa’s collaborative energies extended to her public commissions. In 1973, she unveiled the San Francisco Fountain, which was made in collaboration with over 250 residents, many of them children. Asawa taught them to craft bas-reliefs out of baker’s clay, an economical combination of flour, water, and salt that was then cast in bronze. Soon after, Asawa opened a survey at the San Francisco Museum of Art with a participatory “Dough-In.” She also used baker’s clay as the basis for San Jose’s Japanese American Internment Memorial (1994), which presents vignettes from Asawa’s own family history alongside the details borrowed from books, photos, historical records, oral histories, and family crests. “It’s really autobiographical,” Asawa told a reporter. “It is personal but…very generic too.”

The stereotypical image of the artist at work is one of solitude, a closed door, and a room of one’s own. Not only did Asawa rarely lock her doors; she also handed her children chisels to carve their own swirls. Hers was an art rooted in connection, and she allowed the realities of motherhood to nourish her artistic practice. Her repetitive looped-wire technique was well-suited to a mother’s fragmented time, easily resumed after interruption. For Asawa, the decision was purely practical: “I’ve always had my studio in my house because I wanted my children to understand what I do,” she explained, “and I wanted to be there if they needed me. Or a peanut butter sandwich.”