LBIF Speaker Series: Ruth Asawa Through Line

Date Sunday, June 16; 5:00pm

For Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), drawing served as a center of gravity—the activity she described as her “greatest pleasure and the most difficult.” This talk, based on the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2023 exhibition Ruth Asawa Through Line, will highlight Asawa’s daily practice of drawing and how her approach to materials, line, surface, and space yielded an impressive range of work that speaks to her playful curiosity and technical dexterity. Conaty will emphasize how the artist’s inquisitive approach to artmaking guided many of the curatorial decisions and thematic considerations put forth in the show in an effort to honor Asawa’s belief that “art is not a series of techniques, but an approach to learning, to questioning, and to sharing.”