Ruth Asawa’s Early Wire Sculpture and a Biology of Equality

Abstract

In a fundamentally new interpretation, this article examines how the artist Ruth Asawa’s early wire sculptures engaged the poetics of biology as a metaphor for racial equality. Asawa’s overlooked personal papers attest to her ruminations about race and biology while she was a student at Black Mountain College, from 1946 to 1949. There, Asawa’s earliest wire works proliferated from diagrams in her biology class textbooks—The Invertebrata and Winchester Zoology. Over the next decade, and indeed for the remainder of Asawa’s life, the artist’s biomorphic experiments evoked dividing cells and primordial invertebrates—the biological processes and precedents that constitute all life-forms—gesturing to midcentury scientists’ particular notions of racial equality at the biological level. Asawa’s biological gesture thus seems to be an explicit exfoliation of racial hierarchy, and a rebuttal to the mid-century’s racializing characterizations of her art—like one critic’s description of them as “Eastern yeast.”