Review - A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa

A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa
by Andrea D'Aquino
Date: 2019
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Reading level: C
Book type: picture book non-fiction
Pages: 40
Format: e-book
Source: NetGalley

Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was an influential and award-winning sculptor, a beloved figure in the Bay Area art world, and a devoted activist who advocated tirelessly for arts education. This lushly illustrated book by collage artist Andrea D'Aquino brings Asawa's creative journey to life, detailing the influence of her childhood in a farming family, and her education at Black Mountain College where she pursued an experimental course of education with leading avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Anni and Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Delightful and substantial, this engaging title for young art lovers includes a page of teaching tools for parents and educators.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

I really dislike this sort of picture-book biography. It's more of a showcase for the author/illustrator's work than it is for the artist it's supposed to be about!

As I was paging through the rather ugly illustrations, I assumed that I was looking at samples of Ruth Asawa's work. And I wondered why she was such a big deal, because the art is primitive, uninspiring, and rather juvenile. (Yes, art is subjective. But, to me, it doesn't really feel like art if it looks like something I made myself back in kindergarten. What makes art special for me is if I'm in awe of the artist's skills because it's something I couldn't do myself.) But then I did a quick image search... and found that, unlike the illustrations in this book, Ruth Asawa's art is absolutely gorgeous! She made these wire sculptures that are sort of reminiscent of jellyfish (or something else you might see under the sea). D'Aquino's crude renderings in pencil of these works of art don't do them justice at all. Unfortunately, there's just one photo at the end of the book that shows what Asawa's art really looked like.

I've encountered this problem before in books like Allen Say's Silent Days, Silent Dreams, which was about an artist but didn't feature any of the artist's work, just the author's pale imitations. It feels almost disrespectful to make books like these, to use the story as a springboard for the author's own work while leaving the art of the subject of the book out of the equation!

Asawa's story is interesting, but I found the note at the end far more interesting still. The family's request to leave out the parts about the internment are understandable, but unfortunately it made the actual story seem incomplete (as I was reading, I suspected she might have been sent to an internment camp, and then wondered why it wasn't even mentioned).

Overall, I'm disappointed. I would've rather read a picture-book biography with actual photographs of Asawa's art, rather than some other artist's interpretation of them. Leaving out the artist's actual art didn't work for me in Silent Days, Silent Dreams, and it doesn't work for me here, either.

Thank you to NetGalley and Princeton Architectural Press for providing a digital ARC.

Premise: 3/5
Meter: n/a
Writing: 2/5
Illustrations: 1/5
Originality: 3/5

Enjoyment: 2/5

Overall: 2.17 out of 5