Asawa honored with postage stamps of her wire sculptures
San Francisco sculptor and arts education advocate Ruth Asawa will be honored with a series of postage stamps, the U.S. Postal Service announced Friday, April 3.
The Asawa stamps will feature 10 designs, each depicting a different crocheted wire sculpture, the medium for which Asawa was best known, photographed by Dan Bradica and Laurence Cuneo. Ethel Kessler designed the stamp. The current designs remain subject to change before printing.
The stamps will be available for purchase this year, after a stamp dedication ceremony still to be scheduled. The public will be able to purchase them online at www.usps. com/shopstamps, by calling 8007826724, or in person at post offices.
The stamps come during a month of good publicity for Asawa, who died in 2013 at age 87. Marilyn Chase’s biography of the artist, “Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa,” was released Tuesday, April 7.
Asawa has works on permanent exhibition at the de Young Museum as well as public art on display throughout the Bay Area.
The daughter of Japanese immigrants and a survivor of Japanese internment, Asawa rose to prominence in the 1950s, a time when sculpting was dominated by white men. In 1982, she was instrumental in the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.
Asawa served on the San Francisco Arts Commission, the board of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the California Arts Council and the National Endowment of the Arts.