Artist of the Week 4 - Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa is the artist featured this week on our Artist of the Week PodCast whose tied-wire sculpture "Untitled" recently came into our collection. For the episode, we traveled to San Francisco to speak with Curator of American Art and Director of Contemporary Programs, Daniell Cornell, at the De Young Museum. Daniell Cornell worked closely with Asawa to curate and plan her retrospective exhibition "Contours in the Air". In addition, we spoke by phone with Aiko Cuneo, Ruth Asawa's oldest daughter, who spoke with us about what life was like living with such a prolific and renowned artist.

During the 8 week run of the exhibition "New Year, New Gifts", the San Jose Museum of Art will offer each week a podcast highlighting one of the artists in the show.

The artist in the series are: Hung Liu, Jack Zajac, Rick Arnitz, Ruth Asawa, Richard Misrach, Amy Kaufman, Helen Lundeburg and Manuel Neri.

We hope that visitors will download these podcasts and bring their iPods into the museum to experience the works first hand with the audio. However, these are enhanced podcasts and if you own an iPod that displays pictures or if you view the podcast in iTunes, you will be able to view images from the collection and images from the interviews. But you can also just listen to the audio and enjoy the insight that each podcast will provide.

If you have any comments or questions please email: [email protected]

The music from this podcast, “Oil Thumbprints”, is by the band Bekar Bekar and is from their album Tropism. Check them out at www.westernvinyl.com

Image of Ruth Asawa provided by Laurence Cuneo and came from www.ruthasawa.com