Crafted Abstraction: Three Nisei Artists and the American Studio Craft Movement: Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu

"Crafted Abstraction: Three Nisei Artists and the American Studio Craft Movement" examines the lives and art of Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu, whose artistic careers predate the ethnic and gender movements of the 1970s, and artwork relies on two major themes, craft and abstraction. Through the lens of craft, this study examines how Abstract Expressionism was probed and reconfigured from the perspective of female, American-born Japanese artists. Tracing the history of these three artists' lives shows how handicraft was a significant component of their childhood experiences, a method of cultural preservation during the Japanese American internment, and reconfigured by European mentors and American art students into a vibrant field of American art. As a parallel movement to Abstract Expressionism, the American Studio Craft movement was an alternative space where several Asian American artists could advance modern sculpture and their own personal aesthetics through their abstract expressions. Within an environment that was governed by a different set of artistic values and pressures, these Nisei artists introduced alternative meanings to postwar abstract expression, negotiated and expanded the lessons of their progressive European mentors, and created an unseen network of studio craft artists.;While this study contextually focuses on the ethnic and gender histories of these three artists, it is not meant to circumvent other readings and does not support reading their crafted and abstract motifs as a singular representation of a female, Japanese American aesthetic. This project focuses on the history of Asian American women artists because it is a marginalized history. Examining the choices made by these three artists begins to reveal a deeper understanding of the limitations that these women faced in the art world in conjunction with their ethnicity, and their successes in contributing to American culture. Their use of abstraction allowed them to participate in the craft world, and to a lesser degree the fine art world, by veiling references to their gender and ethnic identities, as well as challenging the limitations of their chosen craft disciplines. This project reads the application of abstraction by the three Nisei artists as a way to subvert a unilateral interpretation, where representation is not predicated on difference; instead their crafted abstraction was a creative imaginating that could live outside, between, or inside a category.