From 1946 to 1949, Asawa studied at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers. With his influence, she learned to use simple materials and started working with wire, incorporating many different techniques. She was particularly influenced by the summer sessions led by Willem de Kooning and especially R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller’s teachings had a profound influence on Asawa and she was inspired to take courses which covered a variety of art forms. This multi-discipline approach motivated her to formulate her unique style of sculpture for which she would become famous.

Asawa’s iron wire sculptures were chosen to be exhibited several times in the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1950s, which brought her notoriety. In 1962, she started working with woven wire sculptures inspired by nature that became more and more geometric, yet at the same time, abstract. Her hanging copper, brass and iron wire sculptures form, by far, the largest body of work in her oeuvre. Over the past six years, her reputation and the prices of her hanging sculptures grown steadily. Ruth Asawa is now considered one of the top artists in the realm of modern art. Consequently, her works can command into the six and seven figures in today’s strong market.

In 2015, a 1973 sculpture by Ruth Asawa called, “Untitled S.621,” (Hanging, Six-Lobed, Multi-Layered, Interlocking Forms with a Sphere in the Third Lobe), was sold by Leigh Keno at his boutique auction house in Manhattan for $965,000 – nearly four times its $250,000 high estimate. The work broke all previous records for a work of six feet and under. The fact that Keno arranged to have the sculpture authenticated and tagged by the Ruth Asawa Authentication Committee was just one of the critical factors that caused it to set a world record price.