Ruth Asawa Through Line

As a young mother, Asawa recalled how her close friend, the photographer Imogen Cunningham, advised her that an "artist can still create by observing what is around them, children, plants, and making images that can be savored when we are old." Asawa took these words to heart, drawing her six children and the community she built as an increasingly active educator and arts advocate in San Francisco. In sketchbooks she carried with her to meetings and reached for at home, Asawa employed line to capture not just the form but also the character of her subject matter, from the folds of a suit jacket to the soft down of an infant's hair.

Her drawings of plant life range from meticulous depictions of the flowers and vegetables she and her husband, Albert, tended in their garden, to graphic records of bouquets Asawa received, which in turn operated as portraits of the giver. Considered alongside her figure studies, these drawings embody what was, for her, "the most important thing, which is in the doing—integrating your life and your work and everything together."