Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was born on a farm in Southern California. She began her arts education as a teenager while she and her family were forcibly detained among thousands of other Japanese Americans at Santa Anita, California, in 1942 during WWII. During this time she began drawing and painting. Asawa studied at Milwaukee State Teachers college in Wisconsin, but was denied a teaching role, required for her to graduate, because of her Japanese heritage. She left Wisconsin in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she was strongly affected by: American Dancer, Merce Cunningham; Ilya Bolotowsky; Joseph Albers; Jacob Lawrence; Beaumont Newhall, Leo Amino; R. Buckminster Fuller. It was during her formative years at Black Mountain where she also met Architect, Albert Lanir, whom she married in 1949 and started a large family. 

Asawa's wire sculptures brought her prominence in the 1950s, beginning with her first solo show at Peridot Gallery, New York. Her work appeared several times in the Whitney Biennial, in a 1954 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial. The artist steadily produced a widely prolific body of work throughout her long career. In the 1960’s Asawa was commissioned for several large scale sculptures in public/commercial spaces in San Francisco and other cities. Fifteen of her wire sculptures are on permanent display in the tower of San Francisco's de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, and several of her fountains are located in public places in San Francisco.The last public commission of Asawa’s career was the Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University, for which she worked with landscape designers to create a memorial in recognition of Japanese Americans interned during World War II, including the 19 San Francisco State University students who were forced to withdraw from the institution in 1942 and detained in internment camps. “I thought it would be nice if we could do something that told the story but not in a bitter way and not just as a Japanese story,” Asawa said of the project, which was unveiled in 2002. “This is a story about liberty and freedom”. In 2006, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco presented a retrospective of her work, titled “Contours in the Air” and featuring 54 sculptures and 45 works on paper. In 2018 the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis opened “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work,” the first major solo museum show of her work in over 10-years.

Today, Asawa is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th-century.Her iconic works are represented in prominent collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the De Young Museum in San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Jose Museum of Art, California; and more institutions. The Estate of Ruth Asawa has been represented by David Zwirner Gallery  since 2017.