Founded in 1933, The Black Mountain College in North Carolina was pretty out there curriculum-wise.
For starters, there wasn’t really a curriculum to speak of. No exams, no required courses, no fees and you could graduate when you wanted.
The whole school ran on community spirit, students and teachers were equal – living, studying and working together to keep the college running.
The college was progressive in its approach to education but also in its admissions policy. Alma Stone Williams, an African American woman, is considered by some to be the first black student to enroll in an all-white institution of higher education in the South during the Jim Crow era. She joined the college in 1944.
And some two years later, with tensions still high after the war, and Pearl Harbour, a student of Japanese descent joined the college and found the encouragement she needed to go on to become an American Master.
Her name was Ruth Asawa.
Ruth Asawa was born in California in 1926. One of seven children of first generation Japanese immigrants, the family leased a fruit farm where they lived and worked together. It was a pretty rough life but Ruth found solace in school and started to take up drawing.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbour, things changed. President Roosevelt ordered more than 100,000 Japanese-American citizens into internment camps.
Separated for years from their father, the Asawa children and their mother were forced to adapt to the unimaginable conditions of living in a prison camp.
However, it was in the camp where Ruth’s artistic tenacity flourished. During her time there she met three other inmates that had previously worked as animators at Walt Disney prior to internment. These professional artists taught classes to students in the camp and helped Ruth hone her own drawing skills.
In 1943 she was granted an early release from the detention centre. As a high school graduate she was able to go onto college. Ruth decided that becoming an art teacher was probably more feasible than becoming an artist, but in her third year after being told that racial tensions would essentially prohibit her from teaching at an American school – she dropped out.
It was some friends that turned her on to Black Mountain College – they were planning to go for the summer. Ruth would spend the next three years there.
At Black Mountain she was exposed to a variety of artistic disciplines from figurative drawing to music and dance – which was one of her favourites. It was Josef Albers –the Bauhaus transplant– that encouraged her to work with commonplace materials, and along with a trip to Mexico in 1947 that introduced her to basket weaving – this enabled Ruth Asawa to uncover the techniques and style that would define her future work and eventually make her an icon.
She said this of her experience of the weaving techniques she witnessed in Toluca, Mexico:
“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It's still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”
Taking wire, the instrument of her imprisonment, she created unique biometric forms, full of beautiful curves and shaped like intricate webs or suspended droplets.
There is a remarkable duality to her sculptures which represent shapes both inside and outside of each other – they’ve been said to embody various material states: interior and exterior, line and volume, past and future.
Her journey through the art world was slow moving. She found herself repeatedly a victim of her race and gender.
Her sculptures were dismissed as mere craft or misrepresented as Orientalism despite her European schooling and American upbringing.
But Asawa was ahead of her time in the way her sculptures defined and interpreted the spaces they existed in.
She was bold and experimental with her methods and approaches – galvanising the wire or electroplating it – running a current through the metal to create textural effects.
In this way she anticipated much of the work that is now being done in sculptural contemporary art.
Community was always at the forefront of her mind, as well as a commitment to arts education – which she focused on heavily throughout her later years.
In the late sixties she spearheaded an education program that blended art study and gardening – mirroring her experiences growing up on a farm, as well as her time at Black Mountain. Learning by doing was the goal.
“Sculpture is like farming.” Asawa said, “If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.”
Keep on keeping on.
Her ability to maintain momentum through all the hurdles life threw at her was perhaps down to some values that were instilled at a very young age by her mother.
In Japanese they are gaman, nintai and enryo – or endurance, patience and restraint
Patience for Ad’s Sake
He waits, that’s what he does…
And so begins one of the greatest TV ads of all time.
But we don’t like to wait anymore do we?
Or do we?
We certainly get told that we’re very impatient these days.
6 second views. Get the brand in. Release the whole series in one day. Binge it in one weekend. Watch the teaser to the trailer to the movie. Watch the opening first 10 minutes before it gets released. Respond to the diss track within 1 hour. Blindshare the post.
Yes.
But in AdLand we love craft. We love to take our time on the details. We yearn to write and shoot longform creative. We want to create lasting legacies for our clients and ourselves. We endure the slings and arrows of outrageous feedback and misfortune. We go again. We endure.
Yes.
We say we want all of those things, but still work at breakneck speed.
We favour tools that get the job done quicker, and curse them when clients can’t discern between early scribbles and final art.
And we fail endlessly.
But if you’re worth your salt, you’ll learn endlessly too.
“Sculpture is like farming.” said Ruth Asawa.
“If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.”
I am impatient.
I was getting frustrated at not having posted an email for a while.
Things got busy. It was easy to jettison this Substack.
But I like doing it.
So I’ve smoothed off some edges, given myself a break on some rules and opened up the apeture to share more things.
More of my art.
And more interesting (hopefully) bits like the above.
And maybe more of this kind of stream of conscious babble.
It’s my ‘sletter, I can do what I want.
Like, comment and subscribe etc!
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan ✌️
Links for Ad’s Sake
🐚 Disco Clam
📱 Chaos Follow
🇺🇸 Trump sings The Black Parade
🍬 Japanese Gum Labels
🏇 2-part Thread on The Commanche