The New York Times reports the death of Ruth Asawa, the wire artist and later sculptor of fountains who was interned during World War II at Rohwer. Asawa, according to the obit, once said she bore no grudge about her internment.
“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”
The obit reports that as a young woman, freed from Rohwer, she studied with Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers.
Asawa was not indifferent to the miseries of internment. On a biographical website, Asawa also relates how terrible it was during the families' first confinement — in two horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack. "The smell of horse dung never left the place the entire time we were there," she is quoted as saying.
The website includes photographs of Asawa at Rohwer and images of her work, which it says was returned to her in the 1980s by Rohwer art teacher Mabel Rose Jamison.