Day One: SKETCH
Ruth Asawa, Hanging Miniature Seven-Lobed Continuous Form Within a Form, 1978
Day Two: ANALYZE
Describe the shapes Ruth Asawa used.
What did Ruth Asawa repeat?
Day Three: INTERPRET
This is an abstract work of art.
Hypothesize about the story, message, meaning or theme.
Day Four: EVALUATE
1. What are the most successful elements of this artwork?
2. What are the weakest elements of this artwork?
3. Overall, I like/dislike this artwork because:
Art History
Get out your sketchbooks and find Bellwork 10
LAST WORKDAY!
Day Five: GRADING
Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”
A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.
“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”