The compliment “out of this world” has now taken on new meaning when it comes to the beloved Modernist sculptor Ruth Asawa. A crater on Mercury was named after the late artist last month, making her one of a rare group of less than 30 women artists whose legacies are etched into our solar systems, including Augusta Savage, Tarsila do Amoral, and Dorothea Lange.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially named the “Asawa” crater on November 14, but the news properly came to light when American curator and art writer Helen Molesworth, who contributed to Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work (2019), shared the tidbit in an Instagram post earlier this week.
According to the existing categories for naming planetary features, craters on Mercury are to reference visual, performing, and literary artists who have made “outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as art historically significant figures for more than 50 years.”
In an email to Hyperallergic, Tenielle Gaither, project lead for the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, which provides information on names chosen by the IAU, explained that an in-process proposal included names for seven other craters on the planet. These are Peruvian painter Julia Codesido; Chinese ink painter Wu Shujuan; Palestinian artist Jumana El Husseini; Uruguayan artist María Freire; Egyptian painter Tahia Halim; 20th-century Ukrainian painter Kateryna Bilokur; and American speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin.
As an artist, Asawa is best known for her biomorphic looped-wire sculptures with repetitive and enveloping structures, oftentimes suspended in the air in a manner that throws into question the differences between line and form, volume and negative space, interior and exterior, and light and shadow. She’s also well-remembered for her works on paper, paintings and prints, and public commissions across California.
Asawa was a fervent advocate for arts education throughout her lifetime. She co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, and championed arts programs and community engagement in schools and beyond through her public service on the San Francisco Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also instrumental in the development of School of the Arts, a public high school for visual and performing arts in San Francisco that was established in 1982.
“Ruth Asawa was an innovative artist who made a lasting impact on Post-War American art and her community in her adopted hometown of San Francisco,” said Henry Weverka, one of Asawa’s 10 grandchildren and president of the estate office managing her legacy. “She often likened her most recognizable looped-wire sculptures to ‘drawing in space’ and considered herself to be a ‘citizen of the universe,’ so it seems fitting to have her name associated with outer space.”
Though it might be the most otherworldly, Asawa’s honorary crater on Mercury is merely one in a number of recent accolades. Most recently, the artist was posthumously awarded the 2022 National Medal of Arts, and the United States Postal Service paid homage to her wire sculptures through a set of 10 forever stamps during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In 2010, School of the Arts was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts to memorialize her contributions to the arts and art education sectors.
“We hope generations of future scientists studying Mercury will take the time to learn about Asawa’s life and work, along with her tremendous contributions to the arts and arts education here on Earth,” Weverka concluded.
