A Line Can Go Anywhere

Starred review from January 15, 2025
An artist grappled with boundaries. Growing up in California, Ruth Aiko Asawa (1926-2013) was keenly aware of an "invisible line" separating her life at home, where she was called Aiko, from school, where she was known as Ruth--though "she could cross back and forth or even straddle it if she had to." This beautifully wrought metaphor for a bicultural Japanese American experience is echoed throughout the book: in the lines a young Asawa drew in the dirt at her family farm and the way she lined up for the Pledge of Allegiance at school. The most important lines, however, were those she made as an artist, especially when creativity sustained her while she and other Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. She studied to become an art teacher, but "because she looked like the enemy, her college wouldn't place her at a school." She persevered and, after the war, found her way to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Drawing inspiration from Mexican wire baskets and memories of barbed wire at the camps, Asawa was driven by the conviction that "art is for everyone." Infused with emotion, the unflinchingly honest text and exquisite mixed-media art, which layers dazzling pops of blue onto muted backdrops, detail the oppression Asawa faced--and her resilience. An informative author's note provides additional context for this story of an innovative artist whose legacy of democratizing the arts is utterly inspirational. A title worth moving to the head of the line. (photograph, bibliography)(Picture-book biography. 7-11)

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Starred review from February 1, 2025
Preschool-Grade 3 *Starred Review* Lines can fence things in. They can lead out and away. This picture-book biography shows how lines did both for American modernist wire sculptor Ruth Aiko Asawa, whose art grew out of being imprisoned as a girl in U.S. incarceration camps during WWII. Both text and illustrations (created using charcoal and watercolor) emphasize lines, both literal and metaphorical. Asawa, one of seven children, grew up on a vegetable farm in California. The first illustration is of her sitting on a horse cart, dragging her toes in the dirt to make lines. We learn that Asawa and her family, as Japanese Americans, must toe an invisible line, being Japanese at home and acting "American" in school and in public. After Pearl Harbor, Ruth's family is imprisoned, first crowded into horse stalls at a racetrack and then sent to a brutal relocation center in Arkansas, surrounded by barbed wire. Two imprisoned Disney animators in the first camp teach Ruth to draw. Later, she uses her fascination with lines to shape the wire sculptures that are now exhibited worldwide in museums and in San Francisco public spaces. This unblinking and timely look at racism is also an inspiring, thought-provoking story.

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