Ruth Asawa: The Tamarind Prints
Cara Manes
Over the course of just two months in 1965, at a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, the Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa produced a stunning portfolio of 54 lithographs, depicting organic forms and plants as well as family and friends. The Tamarind Workshop had been founded by artist June Wayne in Los Angeles in 1960 in an effort to revitalize lithography as a fine art, and offered artists the opportunity to work in collaboration with master printers. For Asawa, it was a rare chance to focus on a single medium and opened up a new chapter of artmaking for her. A testament to Asawa’s radically experimental and collaborative ethos, the Tamarind prints present a discrete chapter of her oeuvre, encapsulating many of the artist’s emblematic motifs. Published in celebration of the artist’s centennial in 2026, this exquisitely produced book illustrates each lithograph made during her residency at the Tamarind Workshop, which have never been published as a complete series.
Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) studied at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s before moving to San Francisco in 1949, where she produced a celebrated body of work that ranged from intricate wire sculptures to calligraphic ink paintings. Asawa continuously transformed materials and objects into subjects of sustained artistic contemplation, drawing on nature, science, and craft to unsettle distinctions between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, and negative and positive space.
Cara Manes is an Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dominika Tylcz is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
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