Everything She Touched

"A fitting homage to this remarkable woman." -The Wall Street Journal

Everything She Touched recounts the incredible life of the American sculptor Ruth Asawa

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. The book also includes over 60 reproductions of Asawa's art and archival photos.

Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer's daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She survived adolescence in the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and attended the groundbreaking art school at Black Mountain College. Asawa then went on to develop her signature hanging-wire sculptures, create iconic urban installations, revolutionize arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, fight through lupus, and defy convention to nurture a multiracial family.

Details

• Author: Marilyn Chase
• Hardcover: 224 pages 
• Date published: April 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN: 978-1452174402
• Product Dimensions: 33.4 x 24.5 cm

Reviews

'An insightful, sharply drawn portrait of 20th-century America from a vantage point of a creative woman swept up in a realm of remarkable artistic productivity' - Wall Street Journal

'The culmination of decades of scholarship, advocacy and even friendship with Krasner ... empathetic and insightful ... Krasner comes wonderfully alive, especially in her own words, in Levin's pages' - Literary Review

'Compelling. Art historian Gail Levin has drawn on her close association with Lee Krasner and extensive research to produce a biography that rings fair and true' - Los Angeles Times

'[Levin's] book, dense with documentation and quotations from letters and interviews, is the culmination of decades of scholarship, advocacy and even friendship with Krasner ... empathetic and insightful ... Krasner comes wonderfully alive, especially in her own words, in Levin s pages' - Literary Review

'[Draws] on her close personal relationship with the painter and a multitude of interviews ... impressively researched' - Spectator

'Art historian Gail Levin's Lee Krasner is a quintuple whammy of a biography--the story of a major artist; a description of a notorious marriage; an education in 20th-century art; a gossipy immersion into Bohemian New York; and a settling of scores against those who practiced gender bias' - The Oprah Magazine

'Unfairly maligned as simply Mrs Jackson Pollock , this weighty first biography reveals a pioneering painter who campaigned for women s rights and created abstract art that pulsed with life' - Artists & Illustrators

'Packed with important insight into the post-war American art scene, this is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary woman' - The Lady