This is an audio clip from a cell phone tour by Guide by Cell to accompany the exhibition The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at the Japanese American National Museum from March 10 - May 27, 2007. Ruth Asawa is a well-known and talented artist, specializing in woven wire art pieces. She is one of the most influential women artists of the 20th century.

This clip was narrated by Daniell Cornell, Curator and Director of Contemporary Arts Projects at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, in March 2007.

Transcription
In 1965, through the support and recommendation of Joseph Albers, Ruth was able to attend the Tamarind Lithography workshop through a fellowship that she attained as the artist in residency there. The workshop usually employed seven printers at a time, who artists then produced work that the printers could experiment with. This was a situation, of course, that Ruth was totally at home with a loved, the notion of experimentation, because her whole life had been about working with materials and experimenting with how they might be transformed, especially if they moved from one medium to another. And, so here was a chance for her to work with lithography. She said that lithography is most like drawing, because you actually do draw on stone plates. Often times today, lithographers use metal plates, but the Tamarind workshop uses the more traditional stone plates, in which an image is drawn on the plate, and then manipulated, and then put through a press. This interesting experimentation and transformation, and the collaborative nature of this project really appealed to every sensibility of Ruth’s. She ended up creating these images, which primarily experiment with the notion of reversal; reversing the image, reversing black and white as tonalities in the images, experimenting with the notion of foreground and background and reversing the sense of the viewer of gestalt in that relationship.