We are offering these three, very different books, as a collection, available to order here and then you may either pick them up in the store or, for a small additional fee, we’ll mail them for you. They all focus on the American artist, Ruth Asawa.

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Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape

By Sam Nakahira

This graphic biography by Sam Nakahira, developed in consultation with Asawa's younger daughter, Addie Lanier, chronicles the genesis of Asawa as an artist -- from the horror of Pearl Harbor to her transformative education at Black Mountain College to building her life in San Francisco, where she would further develop and refine her groundbreaking sculpture.

Hardcover, $19.95

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A Line Can Go Anywhere: The Brilliant, Resilient Life of Artist Ruth Asawa

By Caroline McAlister, Illustrations by Jamie Green

Growing up on a dusty farm in central California, Aiko Ruth Asawa lived between two worlds. She was Aiko to some and Ruth to others, an invisible line she balanced on every day. But when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, thrusting the world into war, suddenly she was Aiko, no matter how much her family tried to cut the lines connecting them to Japan. Like many other Japanese Americans, they were taken to a prison camp. The same barbed wire that now separated Ruth from her old home would inspire her art for decades as she grew to become one of the most famous sculptors of the 20th century. This sweeping picture book biography aimed at early readers especially, but appropriate for anyone, focuses on the childhood of influential Japanese-American sculptor, Aiko Ruth Asawa.

Hardcover, $19.99

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Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury

By Jordan Troeller

For most of modern history, to be an artist and a mother was to embody a contradiction in terms. This "awful dichotomy," as painter Alice Neel put it, pitted artmaking against caretaking and argued that the best art was made at the expense of family and futurity. But in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of artists gathered around Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) began to reject this dominant narrative. In Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury, Jordan Troeller analyzes this remarkable moment. Insisting that their labor as mothers fueled their labor as artists, these women redefined key aesthetic concerns of their era, including autonomy, medium specificity, and originality. This is a big, gorgeous, expensive book produced by MIT Press.

Hardcover, $49.95