Overview

Gallery 9 - Pedagogy and Public Art, 1960s-1970s is a medium sized square room with an angled wall in the front right corner. There is a photo mural and media piece on the front wall, the three other walls have tables along them with photographs, art objects, and two sculptures, and one in the middle of the room.

We enter Gallery 9 in the middle of the back wall. In this gallery there are two described artworks, one of which can be touched. To our right, hung on the back wall is a tactile sculpture and on the left wall of the room is a second sculpture.

The exit to Gallery 10 is in the front left corner of the room on the left wall.

Wall Text

Pedagogy and Public Art, 1960s-1970s

In the 1960s and 1970s Asawa expanded her art practice into San Francisco’s civic life through public artworks and programs with schools. In 1961 she refined her recipe for baker’s clay, which she made from kitchen staples (flour, salt, and water) to occupy her children and their friends. She quickly found unlimited potential in a material that encouraged communal art making. Asawa incorporated baker’s clay in one of the first projects for Alvarado School Arts Workshop, a community-based school arts program she founded in 1968 with fellow parents Sally Woodbridge and Nancy Thompson, among others. As Asawa explained, “Art teaches discipline, craft, respect for tools and for sharing, and finally, self-respect.”

As Asawa’s advocacy helped grow the Workshop across the city, she completed major public commissions “to make a sculpture that could be enjoyed by everyone.” Her bronze fountain Andrea in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square featured a pair of mermaids modeled after family friend Andrea Jepson and frogs based on a pet, while her San Francisco Fountain in Union Square was cast from forty-one baker’s clay panels created with local residents. Asawa said of these collaborations: “Together, a work is created that neither artist, child, nor adult can produce alone.”

Image

Caption

Asawa, her daughter Addie, and friends in the kitchen of Asawa’s Noe Valley home in San Francisco, 1969
Photograph by Rondal Partridge © 2025 Rondal Partridge Archive

Description

A black and white photo of a kitchen with Asawa, a Japanese American woman, sorting buttons and three children baking. On our left, Asawa’s back is to us as she reaches into a round metal container, surrounded by multi color and sized buttons in rows and trays. Across the table from her are three children clustered around a large bowl filled with dough that one of the children is kneading. The other children look on, one holding a pitcher. Rolling pins and other cooking implements lay nearby. In the background are shelves full of dishes, utensils hanging on the wall, and a counter filled with kitchenware and ingredients.

Objects

Peace March Section, San Francisco Fountain (S.216A)

Label Text

1973, cast 1981
Patinated bronze
Private collection

This is one of two bronze casts of the Peace March section of Asawa’s San Francisco Fountain that she created eight years after the fountain’s completion. One was made for a collector, the other she kept for study. Asawa once said that she wished for this fountain “to be touched, loved and patted.”

Feel free to touch this bronze panel from Ruth Asawa’s San Francisco Fountain. As you move your hand across the surface, notice how the grooves and textures vary.

Please do not touch other works of art in the exhibition.

Visual Description

A highly detailed bronze panel carved into a relief depicting four scenes, about the size of a small table, laid out in four unequal quadrants. In our lower left-hand corner, a large eagle with outstretched wings, in our upper-left hand quadrant, a crowd marching in a protest, in our upper right-hand quadrant, and in our lower right-hand quadrant, figures playing in a park.

Guided Tactile Description

This touchable object is a highly detailed bronze panel, about the size of a small table, carved into a relief depicting four scenes laid out in unequal sections. It feels slightly cold to the touch and a bit ashy because of its age.

We’ll explore the entire piece starting in our lower left-hand sections and moving clockwise around the square.

Let’s start at the very edge of the lower left-hand corner of the piece. There you will find a round ball with many little knobs representing a tree. Notice how it’s rough to the touch. Try grabbing onto the knobs and exploring the crevices that represent the leaves. Throughout the piece you will find other trees like this.

Place your open palm on the tree, reaching your fingers up and to your right. Here you’ll find the tip of the left wing of a large eagle. Start to explore the wing and feathers which are also rough in texture, created as if carved with a knife creating distinct feathers and the ridges. Try petting your hand down the wing or rubbing it upwards against the grain to see if you feel a difference in the roughness. Follow along the edge of wing till you find the highest point in the arch of its wing. You may feel something connected to the wing. This is part of a person in the upper section that we’ll come back to later. Follow down the arch of the wing till you find the head and open beak, which is turned to our right. Take some time to feel along the bird’s body and bent legs which are also coated in smaller feathers. It may be hard to distinguish tactilely but grasped in the birds’ claws is a basket that has a smiling woman lying in it.

When you’re done exploring the bird, feel your way back up its body to the highest point in the arch of its left wing. From here we will move into the upper left-hand section.

Moving up the bronze from the bird’s wing you’ll find a small round ball depicting a person’s head. Try grabbing with a few fingers. Moving up from the head is a large crowd of texturally dense people in a protest. There are not many discernable shapes of people but there are a variety of textures in the crowd worth exploring. In the march, people hold banners and signs, that are texturally smooth and flatter with prickly grooves where words have been carved into the material. The signs include slogans such as, “Give Peace a Chance,” “March for Peace,” “Pull Out Dick,” “Jewish Diabetics for Peace,” and “Jesus Saves.” Follow the stream of the protest upwards along the march route, the figures get smaller and smoother as they walk into the distance, almost to the upper edge of entire bronze, where the last small sign reads, “Love.”

Next, we’ll move to the upper right-hand section. With our fingers on the top part of the march, we can feel a distinct right edge where the crowd stops, a narrow crevice and the beginning of the upper right-hand section.

Feel down along that crevice. On our right is a texturally dense area and depicts a neighborhood which is not super clear tactilely. It stretches across the entire top of the upper section. Feel along the houses or trace the rooftops that slightly poke off the edge of the bronze. Moving back to the crevice we just came from, follow it down till it opens to a wide smooth area. There you will find a protruding smooth rounded rectangle depicting a car driving left to right along the neighborhood street. The car has a taller middle and all four wheels.

Moving to our right are two more cars driving in a row. The first two cars are similar in shape but the third is flatter and depicted from the side. You can follow the road all the way to the right edge of the bronze, finding more cars along the way. Underneath this road is another dense neighborhood, with a range of textures representing peaked roofs, staircases, windows, and front gardens. Feel your way along the houses about halfway down the bronze, till you hit a row of bumpy round balls depicting trees, like the one we started with. This is the barrier between the upper and lower right-hand sections.

The lower right-hand section is both visually and tactilely a little hard to identify, but it appears to be a park with many little figures and a large smiling sun.

Letter “S” from “Christmas” (S.007, Wall-Mounted Entwined Mermaid and Merman)

Label Text

ca. 1968
Patinated bronze
Private collection

Building on the mermaid imagery of Asawa’s Andrea fountain, this bronze cast of a baker’s clay figurine the artist created recalls the Christmas ornaments she and her children made, exhibited, and sold around the holidays. This sculpture was Asawa’s first test casting baker’s clay in bronze. As she explained, “Friends said to me, ‘This is child’s play. You should do serious, permanent things.’ So I began making bronzes by means of dough models instead of traditional clay.” She would use the same casting process for her San Francisco Fountain.

Visual Description

A bronze sculpture with a greenish patina of two mermaids arranged in the shape of the letter "S," about the size of a backpack. The back of the mermaids’ heads is nestled against each other at the center of the "S" and their bodies and tails curve up and down to complete the letter. The upside-down mermaid on the top has long flowing hair that swirls across her chest underneath her breast. A belt with a large rectangle buckle connects to her textured and scalloped tail ending in a flared fin. The mermaid on the bottom had thick eyebrows a mustache and a goatee with a large heart shaped medallion on their chest. They each have belts with a large rectangle buckles above their textured and scalloped tails that end in flared fins.

Getting to the Next Gallery

The exit to Gallery 10 is in the front left corner of the room on the left wall.