Everything She Touched, The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase has been released — April 7, 2020.
Publisher’s description: This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa’s story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa’s extensive archives and weaves together many voices—family, friends, teachers, and critics—to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist.
From a review by Sam Lefebre at KQED Arts:
The first comprehensive biography of Asawa, who died in 2013 at the age of 87, reveals the emotional life and personal trials of a social pathbreaker and civic leader who avoided memoir and political outspokenness. Author Marilyn Chase, a San Francisco journalist and teacher, connects the barbed wire and dispossession of Asawa’s early life to the artist’s transformative approach to spooled metal, and intimately conveys the teeming creative life inside her home studio as it filled with six children. The most pronounced through line is Asawa’s deliberately interwoven family and art practice.