An expanded edition of the definitive book on Ruth Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. The work of American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is brought into brilliant focus in this definitive book, originally published to accompany the first complete retrospective of Asawa's career, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2006. This new edition features an expanded collection of essays and a detailed illustrated chronology that explore Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. Beginning with her earliest works-drawings and paintings created in the 1940s while she was studying at Black Mountain College-this beautiful volume traces Asawa's flourishing career in San Francisco and her trajectory as a pioneering modernist sculptor who is recognized internationally for her innovative wire sculptures, public commissions, and activism on behalf of public arts education. Through her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful vocabulary that contributed a unique perspective to the field of twentieth-century abstract sculpture. Working in a variety of nontraditional media, Asawa performed a series of remarkable metamorphoses, leading viewers into a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties. Through her art, Asawa transfigured the commonplace into metaphors for life processes themselves. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa establishes the importance of Asawa's work within a larger cultural context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world, rather than as merely a stylistic practice. This updated edition includes a new introduction and more than fifty new images, as well as original essays that reflect on the impact of American political history on Asawa's artistic vision, her experience with printmaking, and her friendship with photographer Imogen Cunningham. Contributors include Susan Ehrens, Mary Emma Harris, Karin Higa, Jacqueline Hoefer, Emily K. Doman Jennings, Paul J. Karlstrom, John Kreidler, Susan Stauter, Colleen Terry, and Sally B. Woodbridge. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF).

"Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth". (Stephen De Staebler). Over the course of a fifty-year career, Stephen De Staebler (1933-2011) created powerful, elegiac figurative sculptures in clay and bronze. Extending and assimilating an artistic lineage that includes Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, and Alberto Giacometti as well as the art of the ancient Americas, Egypt, and Greece, De Staebler developed a sculptural vocabulary uniquely his own. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area since the late 1950s, De Staebler was among the first students of the legendary Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley. In conjunction with the Bay Area Figurative movement, De Staebler helped to infuse the existentialist agenda of Abstract Expressionism with a profound humanism. Illuminating the significance of De Staebler's practice as never before, curator Timothy Anglin Burgard analyzes the artist's major pieces. Poet and critic Rick Newby sketches a biographical portrait of the sculptor, and renowned art historian Dore Ashton offers a moving tribute to the artist, with whom she was a lifelong friend. Produced in collaboration with the artist and his estate, this authoritative volume - published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco - offers an unprecedented glimpse into the sculptor's studio and process.