Favorite Tour Stop Development at the Amon Carter

Hi folks!

On November 11th, I gave the final version of my demonstration tour to my peers, supervisor, and a few museum visitors that joined the tour unexpectedly. I was filled with nerves for many reasons: my peers are a knowledgeable group who know much more about the collection than I do, my memory recall often fails me, and I wasn't sure if the level of participation and interpretation I integrated into my tour would be well received by my audience.

With any institution I am part of, it is really important to me to feel like I can be myself and as if what I bring to the table is valued. Regularly, my peers and supervisor reassured me that my approach to tour stop development was creative and innovative. The approaches I took were ones that I use in the classroom while teaching or when making work: I use thoughtful questioning and embodiment to help people relate to the work in ways that are meaningful to them. In another class I am taking, our focus this semester has been how to weave empathy into building museum programs. Naturally I found I was considering that content when building my tour stops as well. For this blog post, I will focus on one of my stops that I am particularly excited about and got encouraging responses to. Normally, stops are 5 minutes max, but for this one, I spend a bit more time with the work. As a reminder from my first blog post, the title and theme of my tour is Choices: Radicalism in the Everyday.

We enter the mezzanine and I lead the group to Ruth Asawa's suspended sculpture (fig 1 & 2). As a way to get grounded together and feel the strange presence of this sculpture, I invite them to find a single spot on the piece and focus there for up to one minute. What they find is that the sculpture gently, quietly, and slowly sways and turns as it gravitates above its platform. This quality of the work something that is difficult to notice when you aren't truly present with it for an extended amount of time. I invite the group to tell me what they notice about the work. As they tell me what they notice, I paraphrase back to the group to check for clarity. Next, I invite them to imitate the motions the artist used to create the work to give them an idea of how labor intensive these sculptures are. In one hand, pretend you have a dowel, and in the other, straight iron wire. Asawa would wrap, and wrap, and wrap the strands of iron wire around the dowel until she had enough loops to crochet the beginnings of a form like you are seeing here (fig 3). When people talk about her work, they use words like: ghostly, transparent, and gravity. What else comes to mind? The responses are so varied - some are: feminine, gestational, gravity, micro view of a rain drop breaking, macro view of the universe, seed pods, and soft but also hard. From here, I mention the following contextual information:

• Asawa held multiple intersecting identities as a Japanese American woman with immigrant parents. and it's likely she held other identities that we don't about. She faced many obstacles over her lifetime because of others' perception of her.
• In the hysteria following the outbreak of World War II in 1942, she was incarcerated at an internment camp. There she met Disney animators that encouraged her curiosity and interest in art.
• When she attempted to be hired as a student teacher in Milwaukee to complete her college degree, no one would hire her because of residual hostility and discrimination against Japanese Americans following WWII. Not being able to find work influenced her decision to attend an alternative art school in North Carolina where she developed her philosophies and approach to making work.
• It goes without saying that she, like many other non cisgender men, experienced sexism within the male-dominated modern art world.
• At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she met and married her husband and when determining where they would start a family, they considered locations they believed would be most tolerant of an interracial couple.
• They ended up in San Fransisco and had 6 children. When you google "Ruth Asawa," you will see images of her working on one of these forms within a form and her children are working alongside her (fig. 4) For her, there was no separation between work, life, and art. It was all intertwined and she worked constantly.
• Despite all of the challenges I just laid out, she said: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am." I relate her words to the theme of my tour (Choices: Radicalism in the Everyday). Despite hardship and adversity, she chose to seek out and/or make a community to be part of. 

As the culmination to this tour stop, I give the opportunity to reflect on this mysterious and mystifying piece by utilizing a loose version of Project Zero's "I used to think....now I think" critical thinking strategy. It prompts participants to reflect on the contextual information given about the artist. Does knowing more about the person who made the work result in a deeper connection with the work? Maybe even result in some level of empathy within them? This tour stop was really well received and I can't wait to see how the next group responds. Thank you for reading about this process, I welcome any feedback! 

Fig 1. Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Untitled (S.453, Hanging Three-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1957–59, iron wire. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas,
© The Estate of Ruth Asawa, Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner.

Fig 3. Imogen Cunningham Ruth Asawa Working on Her Wire Sculpture, Gelatin Silver Print, 1956, Amon Carter Website, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchased with funds from the Ruth Carter Stevenson Acquisition Endowment © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Fig 2. Installation view. Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Untitled (S.453, Hanging Three-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1957–59, iron wire. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas,
© The Estate of Ruth Asawa, Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner.

Fig 4. Imogen Cunningham Ruth Asawa at Work with Children, Gelatin Silver Print, 1957, MoMA Website. 
© 2021 Estate of Imogen Cunningham

Sources: 

Chase, M. (2020, April 7). Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa. Chronicle Books, San Fransisco, CA. 

Excerpts from Ruth Asawa of forms and growth, (2016, May 26). Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5eyKMEQizY

Internment, Ruth Asawa, (2020, July 31). Retrieved September 10, 2021, from https://ruthasawa.com/.

La Force, T. (2020, July 20). The Japanese-American Sculptor Who, Despite Persecution Made Her Mark, The New York Times Style Magazine, Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/t-magazine/ruth-asawa.html

Snyder, R. (Producer & Director). (1978). Ruth Asawa On Her Forms and Materials [Film]. USA: Master & Masterworks Productions, Inc. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/ruth-asawa-on-her-forms-and-materials/

The I Used to Think... Now I Think... thinking routine was developed by Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Retrieved from http://www.pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/I%20Used%20to%20Think%20-%20Now%20I%20Think_1.pdf