Ruth Asawa: The Journal

(Hardback)

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Description

A series of beautiful and unique, usable journals, these hardcover, blank books each focus on a single artist, and feature a detail of an artwork wrapped around the cover and endpapers that highlight details from the artist's studies or other works on paper. We offer a variety of grid designs for the interior - lines, circles, traditional grids - that the artist or estate hand selects for their journal. The opening page includes a single quote about making from each artist. The Journal series celebrates the creativity of artists and their ability to inspire. Each edition includes a detail of an artwork on the cover and studies or drawings as endpapers. Produced in collaboration with the artists or artist's estates, The Journal series is printed in limited editions.

Author Bio

Born in rural California, American artist, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was first exposed to professional artists while her family and other Japanese Americans were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. In 1946, Asawa began to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa's time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. She also met architectural student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949 and with whom she would raise a large family and build a career in San Francisco. Asawa continued to produce art steadily over the course of more than a half century, creating a cohesive body of sculptures and works on paper that, in their innovative use of material and form, deftly synthesizes a wide range of aesthetic preoccupations at the heart of twentieth-century abstraction.