Overview

Gallery 2 - Commercial Designs, early 1950s is small a long narrow rectangular room that juts off to our right from the main circulation path of the exhibition. If we stand with our back to Gallery 3, Gallery 2 in front of us.

In this gallery there are two described artworks. On the wall on our right is a painting, on the wall in front of us is a sculpture.

To exit this gallery, go back out the way we came in and we will be in Gallery 3.

Wall Text

Commercial Designs, early 1950s

In the early 1950s Asawa took classes in dance, commercial design, lettering, screenprinting, and painting at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). In these years her work continued to gain local and national attention through exhibitions at the San Francisco and New York showrooms of the interior design company Laverne Originals, and in publications including Vogue.

During this period Asawa made a range of designs for commercial work, including plastic panels based on her paperfolds and wallpaper and textile patterns incorporating logarithmic spiral forms, the Black Mountain College (BMC) laundry stamp, and the footprints of her young children. Although Laverne Originals invited Asawa to mass-produce her looped-wire baskets as home decor, she declined. She explained: “I am interested in producing to sell, but the more I work the more ideas I get and I want to experiment, but experimenting is not producing, since there are always many flops.”

Image

Caption

A fashion shoot featuring Asawa’s Untitled (S.535) in the Laverne Originals showroom, 1951
Photograph by Clifford Coffin for Vogue

Description

A vintage magazine page features two black and white fashion photographs and two paragraphs of small text. The page's headline reads: "How money talks this spring: 'Shortest Jacket - Longest Run for Your Money.'" In the image on the left, a white woman poses seated in front of a tall, looped-wire metal sculpture with multiple lobes. On the right, another white woman wears a similar short jacket with a large collar and pearl necklace.

Objects

Untitled (SF.012d, Baby Footprints [Orange Feet on Blue])

Label Text

1952
Silkscreen ink on paper
Private collection

Visual Description

A painting of red toddler footprints on paper prominently displayed on a blue background filled with a pattern of repeated colorful flowers, about the size of a postcard. The footprints are oriented as if they are walking up the painting starting in our lower right-hand corner where just the toes and ball of the foot enter the frame. Each footprint has individual round toes and creases. The background is adorned with evenly distributed, small, round flowers in pink, yellow, and purple, each with uniform green stem and leaves.

Untitled (S.691, Wall-Mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes)

Label Text

1951
Ink on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of the Cuneo Family

Visual Description

A geometric black and white striped folded paper sculpture in the shape of an elongated leaf. It is about the size of a door. The paper has been folded in a zigzag pattern creating a peaked surface. The folds converge at the top and bottom, forming a structured, accordion-like pattern.

Getting to the Next Gallery

To exit this gallery, go back out the way we came in and we will be in Gallery 3.