The Octopus and the Mountain

[gentle music] In the spring of 1942, a 16-year-old girl named Ruth Asawa was living with her mother and five of her siblings in two horse stalls on the Santa Anita racetrack just outside Los Angeles.

Her father had been arrested by the FBI a few months earlier.

They were rounded up as part of the internment camps that the US government ran during World War II for Japanese American citizens.

Her father was a farmer.

He had been in this country for 40 years.

She would not see him again for six.

She said later that the smell of horse manure never left the place the entire time they were there, and that is where her education as an artist began.

Because among the people imprisoned at Santa Anita were three animators from Walt Disney Studios, Chris Ishii, Tom Okamoto, Ben Tanaka.

They set up art classes in the grandstands of the racetrack and taught anybody who wanted to learn.

Ruth had spent her whole childhood working long hours on her family's farm, and now, for the first time in her life, she had nothing but time, so she drew every single day.

No budget, no curriculum, no accreditation, no permission slip from anyone.

Then the war ended, and she won a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College, where she spent three years studying to become an art teacher.

And in her final year, the college would not place her in the student teaching assignment she needed in order to graduate.

The reason, again, was anti-Japanese sentiment.

The school could not guarantee that anyone would take her, so she left.

No degree, no certificate, three years invested.

Now, I want you to think about these two pictures next to each other.

A fully accredited, fully funded American college with a faculty and board and a catalog and every ounce of institutional legitimacy you could ask for could not find a way to say yes to one student.

And a racetrack full of unfairly imprisoned people could.

A friend told Asawa about a strange little school in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was unaccredited.

It barely gave grades.

It was run jointly by the students and the faculty.

So she showed up in the summer of 1946, and she stayed three years.

Somewhere in there, she found the looped wire technique that made her one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century.

[gentle music] In the spring of 1942, a 16-year-old girl named Ruth Asawa was living with her mother and five of her siblings in two horse stalls on the Santa Anita racetrack just outside Los Angeles.

Her father had been arrested by the FBI a few months earlier.

They were rounded up as part of the internment camps that the US government ran during World War II for Japanese American citizens.

Her father was a farmer.

He had been in this country for 40 years.

She would not see him again for six.

She said later that the smell of horse manure never left the place the entire time they were there, and that is where her education as an artist began.

Because among the people imprisoned at Santa Anita were three animators from Walt Disney Studios, Chris Ishii, Tom Okamoto, Ben Tanaka.

They set up art classes in the grandstands of the racetrack and taught anybody who wanted to learn.

Ruth had spent her whole childhood working long hours on her family's farm, and now, for the first time in her life, she had nothing but time, so she drew every single day.

No budget, no curriculum, no accreditation, no permission slip from anyone.

Then the war ended, and she won a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College, where she spent three years studying to become an art teacher.

And in her final year, the college would not place her in the student teaching assignment she needed in order to graduate.

The reason, again, was anti-Japanese sentiment.

The school could not guarantee that anyone would take her, so she left.

No degree, no certificate, three years invested.

Now, I want you to think about these two pictures next to each other.

A fully accredited, fully funded American college with a faculty and board and a catalog and every ounce of institutional legitimacy you could ask for could not find a way to say yes to one student.

And a racetrack full of unfairly imprisoned people could.

A friend told Asawa about a strange little school in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was unaccredited.

It barely gave grades.

It was run jointly by the students and the faculty.

So she showed up in the summer of 1946, and she stayed three years.

Somewhere in there, she found the looped wire technique that made her one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century.