Ruth Asawa

“I laugh with the sun, and mist that tries so hard to seduce the mountains.”

“I am interested in finding solutions to problems.”

“Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.”

“Activism is wasteful.”

“Because I had the children, I chose to have my studio in my home. I wanted them to understand my work and learn how to work.”

“With art, your motor sense should be developed at full capacity.”

“I'm not so interested in the expression of something, but I'm more interested in what the material can do. And so that's why I keep exploring.”

“We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.”

“Art can only be taught by artists.”

“It's important to learn how to use your small bits of time. All those begin to count up. It's not the long amounts of time you have that are important. you should learn how to use your snatches of time when they are given to you.”

“All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.”

“I used to unwind the wire tags that labeled the crates of vegetables and took the fine brass and steel wires and braided and twisted them together to make bracelets, rings, and figures.”

“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 had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.”

“I think you have to teach kids to work, and you can only teach them to work if you work... I can't delegate jobs if I'm not doing it.”

“An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

“I am able to take a wire line and go into the air and define the air without stealing from anyone. A line can enclose and define space while letting the air remain air.”

“If a nonartist teaches a subject called art, it is nonart.”

“I spent three years there and encountered great teachers who gave me enough stimulation to last me for the rest of my life - Josef Albers, painter; Buckminster Fuller, inventor; Max Dehn, the mathematician, and many others. Through them, I came to understand the total commitment required if one must be an artist.”

“It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.”