ABSTRACT
Several American artists began to adopt craft-based media and techniques to create abstract expressionist fine art sculptural works at mid-century, and their ideas significantly contributed to new forms of artistic expression in the post-war period. The term "crafted abstraction" characterizes not only the hybrid aesthetic that Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu created to reflect their Nisei experience, but also their discursive position as pioneering women artists of color of the American studio craft movement. Ruth Asawa was a modern American artist whose iconic hand-woven hanging wire sculptures blurred the boundary between art and craft. Asawa's chosen technique of looping wire with her hands has often categorized her work as craft because the process of interlocking chains mimics a similar action used in knitting or crocheting. Asawa's notion of transparency in her sculptures is closely related to Lao-Tse's thinking of the immaterial that contains the essence of a material object.
