The amazing universe of Ruth Asawa started at his door

If you pass through the unlocked door and the disjointed garden in the house of Noe Valley of Ruth Asawa between 1966 and 2000, the 5 -foot Japanese artist 5 feet would probably have persuaded you to extend to the kitchen table or the floor of the living room and let it cover your face in plaster. The ethereal clusters of its corrugated loop sculptures would have suspended the rafters of the cathedral ceiling while its six children, and more than 10 grandchildren, ran under the feet.

“Ruthie could lead people to do very bizarre things – because having your face is a completely intimate act,” said Addie Lanier, one of the five surviving children in Asawa. Addie’s son Henry Weverka, who also had his hands and feet thrown by his grandmother throughout childhood, and now supervises her succession, added: “She said she liked to capture a moment in time.”

In the past 35 years of the 20th century, inspired by a Life magazine test representing Roman masks and busts, Asawa has thrown the faces of at least 600 people. They included children in the neighborhood as well as his mentor, the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, an influential teacher at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s and Albert Lanier, the 6 -foot 5 -inch architecture student who met and married there. Asawa, who died in 2013 at 87, suspended her constellation of life masks constantly expanding on the facade of their artisanal style house in a dramatically inclusive welcome gesture.

“If she asked you to do something, nobody ever said no,” said Andrea Jepson, former neighbor of Asawa Who let the artist throw his whole body shortly after childbirth in 1967 as a model for “Andrea”, A bronze mermaid fountain on Ghirardelli square in San Francisco. Jepson remembers that the house was “filled with other people all the time. Nothing has been compartmentalized ”.