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The late Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa regularly drew the floral bouquets family members and others gave her over the years, like for Mother's Day and other occasions. Some of those drawings are now on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a part of a major retrospective. NPR's Chloe Veltman has this report.
CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: Ruth Asawa often drew bouquets in pencil or black ink on white paper, yet they're incredibly vibrant. You can almost see the colors.
ADDIE LANIER: The Cecile Brunner rose is a very pale pink, and the tecorum is a feathery gray leaf, and then it has little lavender flowers, and I bet these roses were white.
VELTMAN: This is Asawa's daughter, Addie Lanier. She gazes at her drawing her mom, who died in 2013, made of a resplendent homegrown bouquet. Her father gave it to Asawa in May 1990.
LANIER: It looks like it probably might be Mother's Day.
VELTMAN: Asawa had six children, so she got a lot of flowers from them on Mother's Day, too.
LANIER: Her table would be, like, you know, a funeral parlor, just really over the top.
VELTMAN: Ruth Asawa loved plants and was an avid gardener. Here she is in the 1978 documentary "Ruth Asawa: Of Forms And Growth" by Robert Snyder.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "RUTH ASAWA: OF FORMS AND GROWTH")
RUTH ASAWA: When you put a seed in the ground, the ground doesn't say, well, eight hours, I'm going to stop growing.
VELTMAN: The artist says people, like plants, don't stop developing.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "RUTH ASAWA: OF FORMS AND GROWTH")
ASAWA: That's why I think that every minute that we're attached to this Earth, we should be doing something.
VELTMAN: Lanier says Asawa liked to draw floral bouquets because they are real living things, unlike her famous abstract wire sculptures.
LANIER: Subject was there. She didn't have to invent anything.
VELTMAN: Asawa received bouquets throughout the year, and not just from family. Well-wishers would give them to her in thanks, often for her community service. And then, years later, with the artist's encouragement, Asawa's children started giving those drawings back to many of the people who originally gave her the flowers.
LANIER: I mean, that's the beauty of these drawings, I think. They're not part of the art market. The exchange is the gift and the friendship.
VELTMAN: Magazine editor Zahid Sardar received one of Asawa's flower drawings.
ZAHID SARDAR: I was touched.
VELTMAN: One of Asawa's sons sent him the drawing around 2010, a couple of decades after Sardar turned up at the artist's house for dinner, bearing a bouquet.
SARDAR: This was a total surprise. I had no idea that she drew the first bouquet that I ever gave her.
VELTMAN: Sardar says the drawing is lovely. And most importantly, receiving it so long after he'd given her the real-life flowers shows how much Ruth Asawa cared about her relationships with people.
Chloe Veltman, NPR News.
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