Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay by Christopher Benfey

Author:Christopher Benfey [Benfey, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101561027
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

10.

This strange idyll was interrupted when the Asawa family was shipped by train to an internment camp in Arkansas. The children attended school at the camp, where they were required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. After the words “with liberty and justice for all,” Asawa and her friends added, “except for us.” Asawa’s ability in art was noticed, and she received a scholarship from the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who took a strong interest in the well-being of interned Japanese Americans. She studied at a teachers college in Wisconsin but learned there was no possibility for a Japanese American to teach there.

Drawn by the murals of Diego Rivera and his associates, Asawa spent the summer of 1945 studying art in Mexico. She watched José Orozco at work and took lessons in fresco painting. She also worked in Mexico with a Cuban-born furniture designer named Clara Porset, who urged her to enroll at Black Mountain College and study with Porset’s friend Josef Albers.

Asawa found a new view of life and art at Black Mountain. At first, she planned to study weaving with Anni Albers, who sent her to Josef’s design class instead. There she learned about handling materials. “Every material has several voices,” she wrote in her notes for one of Albers’s classes. “Let’s find out different possibilities.” She was fascinated by the class exercises in the juxtaposition of materials, finding ways of making one thing resemble a very different thing. “Leather = peanut butter,” she wrote in her notebook. The whole ethos of the class, making art out of leaves and other found objects, suggested a morality based on scarcity, sustainability, and the avoidance of waste. One of her favorite maxims from Albers was: “Get 5 cents from 3 cents.” Scrawled across a class exercise on the meander pattern, she wrote: “Do one get two.” She also liked how Albers used analogies from Taoism and other Asian philosophical traditions.

Summers were particularly vivid at Black Mountain, bringing extraordinary artists and thinkers to the campus. Albers invited two artists to spend the summer of 1946 at the college. One was the African American painter Jacob Lawrence, soon to paint his great series of scenes on the diaspora of black people from the agricultural South to the cities of the North. Albers hired a separate coach for Lawrence and his wife on the train to Asheville so that they would not have to sit in the Jim Crow car. Asawa enjoyed attending the classes of Jean Varda, a charismatic Greek artist who had worked in Paris before the war. Varda talked incessantly of Greek mythology and “the mysteries of the labyrinth.”

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