Overview

Gallery 5 - Noe Valley, 1960-2013 is a medium sized square room with 2D artworks on three walls, and sculptural work on the wall in front of us. The room is painted a light sage green.

We enter Gallery 5 in the back right corner of the room. In this gallery there are eleven described artworks. On the right wall is an ink print, on the left wall is a watercolor and along the front wall is a sculptural door and ten life masks installed above a low circular plinth.

The exit to Gallery 6 is in the front right corner on the right wall.

Wall Text

Noe Valley, 1960-2013

By 1960, Asawa, Lanier, and their six children—Xavier, Aiko, Hudson, Adam, Addie, and Paul—had outgrown three San Francisco residences. Later that year she and Lanier purchased a large house on an oversize lot just east of Twin Peaks in Noe Valley, then a “sleepy little blue collar neighborhood,” as Asawa described it.

The 1908 house was designed by Walter Ratcliff and Alfred Jacobs in the spirit of Bernard Maybeck, the legendary UC Berkeley professor who fueled the region’s Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century. The cedarshingled exterior blended with its site, while a deck off the kitchen made for a fluid relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces. Overall, the design of the house evoked a casual ease of living. Lanier spent a year renovating—including excavating to create a studio for Asawa and additional bedrooms—before the family moved in in the fall of 1961. Asawa designed monumental new front doors. The family went on to build walkways from cobblestones scavenged from San Francisco beaches and planting beds for flowers, herbs, and vegetables that would prove to be an enduring source of inspiration.

Image

Caption

Asawa in the garden of her home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood, 1971
Photograph by Laurence Cuneo

Description

A color photograph viewed slightly from above of Asawa, a Japanese American woman walking towards us along a curving cobblestone path in a garden. Her figure is blurred as she moves wearing dark glasses, a dark jacket, and blue jeans. The path is bordered by a stone wall on our right and tiers of lush green plants with colorful flowers on our left.

Objects

Untitled (WC.187, Two Watermelons)

Label Text

1960s
Ink on technical paper
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Visual Description

An ink painting of two elongated watermelons with a striped pattern depicted on a light beige piece of paper, about the size of a small table. The melons are represented one in front of the other, slightly obscuring the melon in the back. The pattern on the rind alternates between lime green and opaque yellowy green, the edges slightly blurred in some areas as if water has been used to soften the zig zagging edges of the stripes.

Untitled (WC.063, Nasturtiums)

Label Text

ca. 1960s
Watercolor on paper
Private collection

Visual Description

A watercolor with a dense allover composition of the round green leaves and pink and yellow flowers of a nasturtium plant. The watercolor is the size of a standard piece of paper. The composition consists of overlapping circular and organic shapes with soft edges bleeding into one another. The green round shapes make up most of the piece, ranging from dark to light shades, while pink and yellow three lobed V shaped flowers are tucked in between the leaves. In our upper right hand corner, typed text reads, "Kromekote C1S Litho Sub 60 White Blake, Moffitt & Towne."

Doors (S.528, Carved Redwood Doors for Ruth Asawa's Home)

Label Text

1961
Redwood
Private collection

The first project Asawa envisioned for their new home was this oversize pair of front doors, which she made at the family’s country property in Guerneville, Sonoma County, while Lanier worked on house renovations in San Francisco. On conjoined nine-foot-long planks, Asawa drew an allover pattern of interlocking waves—the “meander” that she had begun exploring while she was a Black Mountain College student—that crosses over the doors when closed. Asawa engaged her older children in the execution of the design. With mallets and chisels they conjured the swirls, then smoothed out the surface with wire brushes and a blowtorch.

Visual Description

Two towering, narrow wooden doors stand side by side, each featuring elaborate curling carved designs. The burnished wood is dark and aged, with a visible grain that adds texture to the surface. The carvings consist of swirling, abstract wave like patterns that cover the entirety of each door.

Untitled (LC.015-007, Trude Guermonprez Life Mask)

Label Text

1970s
Glazed bisque-fired clay
Private collection

Asawa began casting from life in 1966, inspired both by a lecture by potter Marguerite Wildenhain and by a Life magazine photo-essay on the visual legacy of the Roman Empire published that year. Between 1966 and 2000 she created hundreds of unique casts of family and friends, local schoolchildren, and colleagues. The artist typically made two casts from each mold—one for the model and one to install on the side of her house, along the walkway to its front doors. The earliest casts, including the one here of her daughter Addie, show the models with cloth covering their hair.

A grouping of 233 of Asawa’s face masks is on long-term display at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Visual Description

A glossy ceramic cast of Trude Guermonprez's face as an older woman. The surface of the sculpture is glossy, with a mix of earthy brown and green glazes. Her narrow face is highly realistic with thin strands of reddish-brown hair falling across her forehead, thin eyebrow hairs stand out in a coppery red, above softly closed eyes. Deeper moss greens pool in the slight divets under her eyes and the crease of their full lips.

Untitled (LC.052, Larry Woodbridge Life Mask)

Label Text

ca. 1967-69
Bisque-fired clay
Collection of Larry Woodbridge and Clare Bauman

Visual Description

A brownish red clay cast of Larry Woodbridge's face. He appears young with a smooth face and realistic details indicating the rounded nose, closed lips and eyelids. Laying across his high forehead are a few strands of hair etched into the clay. The edge of the mask is not symmetrical, showing more of his cheek and the side of his face on our left.

Untitled (LC.050, Haru Asawa Life Mask)

Label Text

ca. 1967
Bisque-fired clay
Private collection

Visual Description

A sand-colored clay cast of Haru Asawa's face as an elderly woman. She has a round face and pronounced cheek bones, her mouth is closed into a slight smile, eyes closed tight. Her hair is short with deeply textured lines. Short whispy angles bangs lay across the top of her wide forehead. The texture of the clay shows every detailed hair and few wrinkles around her mouth and the edges of her forehead.

Untitled (LC.049, Albert Lanier Life Mask)

Label Text

1994
Bisque-fired clay
Private collection

Visual Description

A yellowish clay cast of Albert Lanier's face. His head is tilted slightly downward, thick furrowed eyebrows, wide pursed lips, and heavily wrinkled forehead. His hair is highly textured with a slight receding hairline at the edges and a short goatee.

Untitled (LC.047, Addie Laurie Lanier Life Mask)

Label Text

ca. 1966
Bisque-fired clay
Private collection

Visual Description

A dark brown clay cast of Addie Lanier's face as a child. The mask has a slightly rough texture and is a dark brown color, with subtle detailing of her closed eyes and parted lips. There are no visible eye lashes, eyebrows, and her head is smooth with a lightly carved line along where her hair line would be. The surface of the mask appears weathered, with light patches and markings visible, including a noticeable white spot on the nose area.

Untitled (LC.040-036, Mae Lee Life Mask)

Label Text

1970s
Bisque-fired clay
Private collection

Visual Description

A yellowish white clay cast of Mae Lee's face as a middle-aged woman. The mask depicts a face with closed eyes, detailed eyebrows, and lips. Her textured hair is parted on the side and combed over neatly. The clay surface has a slightly rough texture.

Untitled (LC.046, Barbara "Bobbie" Dreier Life Mask)

Label Text

ca. late 1970s
Glazed bisque-fired clay
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, gift of Katherine Dreier

Visual Description

A black and dark reddish bronze glazed clay mask of Barbara "Bobbie" Dreier's face. The texture of the mask is smooth and reflective with a mottled surface. Her eyes and wide thin lips are closed, a deep furrow between her eyebrows. The features are well-defined, with a prominent nose and subtle impressions of hair on the top of her head.

Untitled (LC.051, Hudson Cuneo Life Mask)

Label Text

1987
Bisque-fired clay
Private collection

Visual Description

A beige clay cast of Hudson Cuneo's face as a child. The texture of the clay is mostly smooth with fine details around the eyebrows, closed eyelids, and lips. His hair is subtly textured, blending into the smooth surface of the clay.

Getting to the Next Gallery

The exit to Gallery 6 is in the front right corner on the right wall.