In August, just a few months ahead of the November US election, the US Postal Service (USPS) was in the news when US President Donald Trump stated he opposed its funding as he didn't support mail-in voting. While the Coronavirus pandemic prompted many people to opt for mail ballots, Trump claimed indeed that postal voting invites fraud.
In August people in the United States also complained on social media about the mass removal of blue mailboxes in some areas. While this procedure is normal when a mailbox registers a decline in mail volume, the decision was seen as limiting the ability of some voters to send back mail-in ballots, another attempt by Donad Trump to interfere with the elections and manipulate the postal system. While Trump reassigned or displaced at least 23 USPS executives, in August the US Postal Service announced it would stop taking letter collection boxes off streets in Western states.
As the saga of the mail ballots and Trump continues, there were also some good news from the USPS - the release in August of a set of stamps celebrating Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013).
Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, from Japanese parents. During World War II, her family was interned first at the Santa Anita racetrack and then at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.
During her internment Asawa spent her time drawing and, after getting an ID card from the War Relocation Authority, she was allowed to travel to Milwaukee where she attended college. Since no school in Wisconsin would hire someone who was Japanese even at the end of the war, she could not complete her fourth college year that was supposed to be devoted to practice teaching.
She therefore enrolled in the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda in Mexico City and at the University of Mexico. Here she met Clara Porset, an innovative furniture designer from Cuba who had been at Black Mountain College where Asawa decided to move to pursue further studies in art.
From 1946 to 1949, Asawa studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College where she started using common materials and experimenting with wire. She was also influenced by the Black Mountain College summer sessions of 1946 and 1948, that featured among the others choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Willem de Kooning, and architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller.
In 1959 Asawa married architect Albert Lanier and in the following decade she started making crocheted industrial wire sculptures employing a technique she learnt in 1947 while in Toluca, Mexico, where villagers made egg baskets from galvanized wire. "I found myself experimenting with wire,"’ she explained, "I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space.... I realized that I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand, because a line can go anywhere."
Asawa started creating a series of spheres, cones and elongated structures that she suspended in space. More experiments followed in the '60s: Asawa moved from the geometrical shapes she found in nature - plants, snail shells, spiderwebs, insect wings and water droplets - to design ethereal structures reminiscent of radiolaria, and created large wall-mounted pieces inspired by the internal structure of a desert plant.
In addition to her wire sculptures, Asawa is also acclaimed for her large public commissions: among them fountain in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco; the Japanese American Internment Memorial in San Jose, CA; and San Francisco State University's Garden of Remembrance, commemorating Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Asawa also established the first public arts high school on the West Coast in 1982 - renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010.
Her sculptures, spheres, hourglass shapes and elongated tubes evoking organic forms, are the protagonists of the 20 stamps (issued as Forever stamps, so they will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail 1-ounce price) dedicated to her.
The set of stamps features photographs by Dan Bradica and Laurence Cuneo for David Zwirner gallery. The selvage features a photograph of Asawa taken by Nat Farbman in 1954 for Life magazine, while Ethel Kessler served as art director and designer. The set of stamps is highly symbolical as race and racism played an important role in Asawa's personal story and the stamps are a testament to a woman and artist who loved travelling, sending and receiving letters, but also a symbol to migrants and people discriminated because of their ethnicity and nationality.
The Ruth Asawa stamps are available at Post Office locations in the US and online and they will hopefully be used by voters who do not have absentee ballot postage-paid (it is indeed worth remembering that in some American states it is up to the voter to pay for postage to return a mail ballot envelope to the election official).
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