Overview

Gallery 12 - Public Commissions, 1970s-1990s is a medium sized, square room with one case near the entrance, one along the left wall, and one case near the front right corner.

We enter Gallery 12 in the back left corner of the room. In this gallery there are two described art objects in the two cases in the room. The first case is located slightly to our right as we enter the gallery and has a sculpture. The second case sits in the front right corner of the room and has index cards.

The exit and the entrance are the same. To exhit the exhbition, go back into Gallery 11. The exit is in the front right corner along the right wall.

Wall Text

Public Commissions, 1970s-1990s

Asawa completed more than a dozen public sculptures in San Francisco and Northern California over the course of her career. Many of them exemplified her collaborative approach. She often used commission budgets to pay artists to provide their expertise. As she said, “If each person feels he’s contributed . . . then we will produce a good thing.” These large-scale works also reflected her commitment to arts education. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she tried to engage students to learn through doing.

After completing beloved city monuments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asawa continued to work in the civic realm. Large-scale works including her Origami Fountains (1975-76) at San Francisco’s Nihonmachi Pedestrian Mall and her waterfront fountain Aurora (1984) on the Embarcadero explore her long interest in origami and paper folding. In 1994 Asawa debuted her monumental Japanese American Internment Memorial, commissioned by the City of San José. Created in collaboration with her artist-son Paul Lanier and artist Nancy Thompson, this sculpture more directly addressed personal and shared stories of unlawful incarceration during World War II. As Asawa explained, “Stories are usually written first, then illustrated. . . . I first made the sculpture.”

Objects

Untitled (S.124, Freestanding, Reversible Vessel Form)

Label Text

ca. 1972
Patinated bronze
Private collection

Designed for an unrealized commission for a church, this sculpture was included in Asawa’s 1973 mid-career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) along with a display of the artist’s experiments in paper structures. A large-scale abstract lotus flower and vase with a similar form based on her paperfolds would become the centerpieces of her Origami Fountains, Asawa’s commission for San Francisco’s Nihonmachi Pedestrian Mall in 1975-76.

Visual Description

A bronze sculpture with a green patina, similar to the size and shape of a large vase, created with a pleated fan-like design. The sculpture flares outward at the top and tapers down to a narrow base, appearing to stand upright. The folds and angles create deep angular symmetrical ridges.

Index cards with mon: Asawa, Sekimachi, Hibi, Kiuchi, Kitagawa, Fujino, box 178

Label Text

Index cards with mon (Japanese family crests) that Asawa’s daughter Addie collected from local families and used for the ends of her Japanese American Internment Memorial (PC.011), 1994
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

On March 5, 1994, Asawa unveiled her Japanese American Internment Memorial, which she described as “my way of telling my life story in bronze.” Cast from baker’s clay panels, the sculpture portrays Japanese migrants in California on one side. The other depicts the period during World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorized the forced removal and unlawful incarceration of people of Japanese descent, including the Asawas and the Redress Movement of the 1980s. In 1942, the Asawas were separated and ordered to relocate to the converted racetrack at Santa Anita Assembly Center and later to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. Asawa was granted permission to pursue a college education outside of the camp in 1943. Reflecting on her own experience and that of many others, Asawa described that this work aimed “To put a human face on that experience. The preservation of this art will help the future generations to know what happened during that time.”

Commissioned by the city of San José, the memorial took almost five years to complete. Beginning with extensive research by Asawa and her daughter Addie, followed by gathering approvals, finally the design and fabrication could be executed by Asawa, her son Paul, artist Nancy Thompson, sculptor Dennis Fujimoto, and assistant Mae Lee. Detailed scenes blend Asawa’s memories, oral histories, and photographs with subjects including the arrest of her father Umakichi and incarcerated weavers making camouflage nets at the converted racetrack of Santa Anita Assembly Center where Asawa, her mother, and five siblings were initially sent. These and other scenes are framed with Japanese family crests (mon) that were gathered through local organizations and Asawa’s connections to the Japanese American community. The family mon underscore Asawa’s focus on shared experiences: “What my family went thru is the story of almost every Japanese American family.”

Visual Description

Six standard index paper cards featuring graphic black and white Japanese Mon's, or family crests. Asawa—A circle surrounding two crossed feather like designs. Sekimachi—A bold, geometric design with two white horizontal bars inside a circle. Hibi—Eight small white circles surrounding a central white circle. Kiuchi—Three broad symetrical leaves with pronounced veins curving downward with smaller multi leaved stems sit on top. Kitagawa—A white circle surrounding a tile like design with a central symetrical geometric four lobed flower. Fujino—A white circle surrounds three symetrical broad leaves arranged in a radial pattern with pronounced veins.

Getting to the Next Gallery

The exit and the entrance are the same. To exhit the exhbition, go back into Gallery 11. The exit is in the front right corner along the right wall.

From here, we exit the exhibition and return to the main atrium where the restrooms and water fountain are located.