Stamped ink on fabric sheeting
Not on view
While working at a student-run laundry facility at Black Mountain College, Asawa found a rubber stamp with the school’s initials. Intrigued by its design potential, she applied the stamp to fabric with varying pressure in mirrored rows, forming undulating columns. The result was an allover pattern similar to that of a woven textile. Asawa’s experimentation with the orientation and overlapping of stamps allowed her to alter the letters’ visual forms, creating new shapes in the process—C’s facing each other, for example, create H’s.
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, October 19, 2025–February 07, 2026
Gallery label from "Collection 1940s—1970s," 2019
Asawa created this work while she was in charge of the student-run laundry facility at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina. Moving in a pattern of rows and columns, she applied an inked laundry stamp with the college’s initials to a large portion of a bedsheet. Her systematic repetition causes the letters to merge and form a grid much like the warp and weft of a textile. The school encouraged students to mine the possibilities of unorthodox materials and processes, no matter how mundane. The patterns seen here anticipate the repetitive loops in the wire sculptures she would soon begin to make.
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Ruth Asawa
American, 1926–2013 58 works onlineWhether it’s a craft or whether it’s art. That is a definition that people put on things,” artist, activist, and educator Ruth Asawa has said.
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Black Mountain College
A small liberal arts college founded in 1933 by John Rice on a farm in Asheville, North Carolina, and continued under changing leadership until 1957.
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