Overview

Gallery 3 - Forms within Forms: The Early San Francisco Years, 1950s is a large, rectangular room with a case in the middle of the room, artwork on the wall, and four clusters of sculptures jutting out from the walls at staggered intervals.

We enter Gallery 3 in the back left corner of the room. In this gallery there are five described artworks. The first is a ring in a case with a collection of other objects. Along the wall on our right is an ink drawing and then a cluster of three suspended looped-wire clusters hanging above a low round plinth, one of which is described. In the front left corner of the gallery is a cluster of five suspended looped wire sculptures hanging above a low round plinth, two of which are described.

The exit to Gallery 4 is in the front right corner of the room, diagonal to where we entered Gallery 3.

Wall Text

Forms within Forms: The Early San Francisco Years, 1950s

“These sculptures are made of a continuous wire … enclosing volumes transparently … and producing forms within forms … . The wire must be continuous and the hollow shapes can only be shapes that grow this way.”

—Ruth Asawa

In 1949 Asawa settled in her adopted hometown of San Francisco and married Albert Lanier, an architect and fellow Black Mountain College (BMC) student, with a ring designed by their teacher and friend, the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. As Asawa and Lanier welcomed six children over the course of the decade, she vastly expanded the scale and ambition of her hanging looped-wire works—no two alike—which featured increasingly elaborate forms. Asawa’s creativity likewise exploded as she conjured complex interlayered, transparent shapes and grew a broad vocabulary of spheres, cones, and collars in her hanging sculptures.

In the early 1950s Asawa developed her signature “continuous form within a form” seen in her three-dimensional works, which explores the interchange of interior and exterior surfaces. In paintings and works on paper, she incorporated common objects such as fruit and commercial drafting markers as tools to explore organic structures and mathematical principles. As she explained, “I have tried to make use of the space inside and find that what is an outer surface can become an inner surface. . . . From drawings I know that a sensation of watching metamorphosis can be achieved through the grouping of related forms at studied distances apart.”

Image

Caption

Asawa and her children at home on Saturn Street, San Francisco, 1957
Photograph by Imogen Cunningham © 2025 Imogen Cunningham Trust / www.ImogenCunningham.com

Description

A black and white photograph of Asawa, a Japanese American woman, and her four young children sitting on the floor underneath two large suspended looped-wire metal sculptures. Asawa is bent over, behind a hanging sculpture, working on a sculpture on the floor in between her legs, elbows resting on her spread knees. On our left a child is crouched on a table, reading a book or magazine. The children on the ground are playing with a spool of metal wire and a wooden stick, the youngest baby sits naked drinking from a bottle. Both sculptures float above their heads extending past the top edge of the frame and filling the space. The large sculpture in the center of the frame is shaped like an hourglass with spheres suspended in each lobe. The sculpture on our left is longer and narrower with three lobes and multiple layers creating a dense mesh.

Objects

Buckminster Fuller

Label Text

Born 1895, Milton, Massachusetts; died 1983, Los Angeles

Ruth Asawa’s wedding ring, 1949 Fabrication: Mary Jo Slick (Godfrey) Sterling silver with river rock

Private collection

Visual Description

A ring featuring a prominent black stone set in three silver bands. The stone is round and smooth, with a matte finish. Overlaid symmetrically on the stone are three thin silver strips, intersecting to create a triangle at the center. The band is made of three polished silver bands.

Untitled (MI.075, Chair with Five Bars)

Label Text

ca. 1958
Ink on paper mounted on board
Private collection

Visual Description

The silhouette of a white chair on a black background fills the entire frame of this black ink drawing. It is about the size of a baking sheet. Our perspective of the wooden chair is slightly skewed making it look like the chair is tilting down towards our right. The backrest is composed of five thin vertical slats. The arm rests curl as they meetthe seat of the chair. The arm rest on our left is created with black ink, while the one on our right is formed with negative space, just like the rest of the white chair. Both the top of the backrest and legs of the chair are cut off at the edges of the frame.

Untitled (S.030, Hanging Eight Separate Cones Suspended through Their Centers)

Label Text

ca. 1952
Iron wire
Private collection

These large-and-small-scale sculptures show the wide range of shapes, forms, and sculptural motifs Asawa developed out of her looped-wire technique, including hat-like stacks of interconnected cones, multilobed hanging sculptures, and intimate open forms that enclose space with bending “ears” and “tails.” As Asawa explained, “The work is one which dictates a way of growing and the more one learns about this way of growing the more possibilities are opened up for the creating of sculpture peculiar to the process.”

Visual Description

A hanging vertical wire sculpture comprised of eight tiered cones that each flare at their open bases. The tapered narrow tip of each cone-shaped section protrudes into the cone above it suspended through their centers. The sections are crafted from a thin looped iron wire. The cones are the same size with subtle variances in their slightly irregular shapes. The sculpture is about the height of a door.

Untitled (S.095, Hanging Single-Lobed, Six-Layered Continuous Form within a Form)

Label Text

ca. 1952
Iron wire
Private collection

Visual Description

A round looped-wire lobe with six smaller shapes nestled inside each other. The layers are connected to each other creating a continuous form within a form. The sculpture has a bulbous, round shape, about the size of a large beach ball, suspended by a thin wire creating a small peak at the top, resembling an onion. The first nested object is about half the size of the outer lobe with the additional four shapes packed tightly, one within the other creating a dense area at the base of the main lobe.

Untitled (S.453, Hanging Three-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form)

Label Text

ca. 1957-59
Iron wire
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, purchase with funds from the Ruth Carter Stevenson Acquisition Endowment

In the early 1950s Asawa developed her signature “continuous form within a form” technique for her looped-wire sculptures. Seldom are they made from a single strand of wire. She seamlessly connected the inner and outer layers creating a continuous surface of wire. The works at left, including Untitled (S.095), the earliest known example, reveal the countless possibilities Asawa discovered in this motif. She went on to translate it into drawings and paintings such as those on view nearby that trace the transformation of a single line. As she explained, “I discovered that you just continuously feed it . . . until you can’t go any further. . . [it] continually reverses itself.”

Visual Description

A hanging vertical looped-wire sculpture consisting of three distinct bulbous forms connected by narrow neck-like structures. The sculpture is about the height of podium, with a slightly peaked top. Nestled in the main form are two additional layers of looped-wire structures that mimic the outer undulating form. The top and bottom sections are more bulbous, while the middle section is slightly flattened out and elongated.

Getting to the Next Gallery

The exit to Gallery 4 is in the front right corner of the room, diagonal to where we entered Gallery 3.