{"title":"Doubled Abstraction: Ruth Asawa's Stamp and Its Afterlife","authors":"Isabel Bird","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12725","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Ruth Asawa's final year at Black Mountain College, <i>c</i>. 1948–49, she used a rubber stamp borrowed from the laundry room and featuring the college's initials (BMC) to make a body of work. Three years later, a pattern derived from this work was mass-produced and marketed across the US under the name Alphabet – without attribution to Asawa, nor to the school for which the pattern's acronym stood. This essay examines the doubled abstraction of Asawa's stamp (in the sense of both material tool and figurative signature), as the letters that she first abstracted into images were subsequently disassociated from both her name and that of the school itself. By tracing Asawa's eventual reclamation of her authorship from this contextual abstraction, this essay makes a broader case for recognizing artistic practices of self-definition.</p>","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Art History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8365.12725","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In Ruth Asawa's final year at Black Mountain College, c. 1948–49, she used a rubber stamp borrowed from the laundry room and featuring the college's initials (BMC) to make a body of work. Three years later, a pattern derived from this work was mass-produced and marketed across the US under the name Alphabet – without attribution to Asawa, nor to the school for which the pattern's acronym stood. This essay examines the doubled abstraction of Asawa's stamp (in the sense of both material tool and figurative signature), as the letters that she first abstracted into images were subsequently disassociated from both her name and that of the school itself. By tracing Asawa's eventual reclamation of her authorship from this contextual abstraction, this essay makes a broader case for recognizing artistic practices of self-definition.
期刊介绍：
Art History is a refereed journal that publishes essays and reviews on all aspects, areas and periods of the history of art, from a diversity of perspectives. Founded in 1978, it has established an international reputation for publishing innovative essays at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship, whether on earlier or more recent periods. At the forefront of scholarly enquiry, Art History is opening up the discipline to new developments and to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches.
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