Ruth Asawa Through Line

Asawa learned to make origami as a child and later encountered the art at Black Mountain College where students were encouraged to test paper's structural and visual possibilities by folding it. Repetitive pleats rendered the paper pliant and sculptural, and the resulting paperfolds often became prompts for drawing exercises. Working in oil on paper or board, Asawa made rows of parallelograms that suggest the paperfold's rippling topography and sought out color combinations that would make them appear to project out from, or recede into, the picture plane.

Related exercises in oscillating figure-ground relationships include her triangle studies—inspired by thorns she gathered from around Black Mountain's campus and pinned together into a chain—and her logarithmic spiral prints. A growth pattern commonly found in nature, the spiral appeared in Josef Albers's drawing classes and in her geometry lessons with the philosopher and mathematician Max Dehn. Black Mountain's curricular emphasis on the relationship between art, nature, and mathematics would become an undercurrent of Asawa's teaching philosophy in later paper-folding workshops.