This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.
How does an important artist become an artist we know and love? It often starts at an early age, from a relentless energy to create. That energy is the focus of Sam Nakahira’s forthcoming graphic novel Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape (due out in March from Getty Publications). This tenderly illustrated new book opens with a scene of a teenage Ruth Asawa playing with wire in a cabbage field in Norwalk, California, just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Already, she is transforming unexpected material into something new while maintaining its essence—a process core to her practice, as we later learn.
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This idyllic scene, however, is paired with some foreboding text: “Sunday, December 7, 1941, 10:30 a.m. […] Before Everything Changed.” As we take in the scene around Asawa—known as Aiko to her parents but Ruth (her “American name”) to everyone else—her sister Chiyo comes out ringing a bell and yelling, “Come quick! Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.” Things quickly change for Asawa: when she goes to school the next day, Nakahira imagines her thinking to herself, “Suddenly I knew who my friends were. Not many.”
By March 1942, the family begins to burn anything and everything that might denote their Japanese heritage, from kimonos and family photos to books on flower arranging and even the addresses of relatives in Japan. It doesn’t help: her father is taken in by the FBI for questioning and the rest of family is soon forcibly removed from their home, first to the Santa Anita Park racetrack, about 20 miles north of their home, and then to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, not far from the Mississippi River.
Nakahira poignantly illustrates this harrowing experience, which thousands of Japanese Americans faced during World War II. But she also balances the darkness with moments of joy that those who have faced such atrocities are lucky to find in order to keep going. At Santa Anita, where detainees are forced to sleep in horse stables and to make camouflage nets as part of the war effort, Asawa meets a few Japanese Americans who were animators at Walt Disney Studios. They teach her how to draw, notice her talents, and encourage her commitment to wanting to be an artist. “Everything was gray until I met the cartoonists,” Asawa says. “Truly, art has saved me.”
Asawa continues to face discrimination throughout her life. She can’t complete her art-teaching degree because she can’t get a teaching post in 1946 due to continued anti-Japanese racism. She recalls her mother saying, “Bend, don’t break.” That leads her to study at the iconic experimental art school Black Mountain College, with the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.
Nakahira goes on to detail the early stages of Asawa’s career, how she arrived upon her signature wire-bent sculptural style, and her relocation to San Francisco. The short graphic novel, just under 100 pages, ends while Asawa, whose star has only continued to rise in the decade since her death in 2013, is still young, with so much life left. Perhaps there will be a sequel. In any case, An Artist Takes Shape is a significant new publication—similar in a way to Faith Ringgold’s 1991 book Tar Beach—in that it allows children, especially Asian girls, to dream big about the power of art, even in the most ghastly of times.