Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), known for her intricate looped wire sculptures, will be the subject of the next Google Doodle, as the search engine will change its homepage logo to feature the artist creating her hanging woven works today at 9 p.m. (PST).
Born in Los Angeles, Asawa spent much of high school in Japanese internment camps in California and Arkansas. She studied art at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, and Franz Kline.
Asawa and her basket-like works were well known in San Francisco, where she lived from 1949, but she was sometimes dismissed as a decorative artist. When David Zwirner Gallery started representing the artist’s estate in 2017, her career started to have something of a reappraisal.
The Asawa Doodle, by Google staff artist Alyssa Winans, features five of the artist’s hanging wire sculptures, as well as Asawa at work on a sixth, forming the lowercase “g.”
There have been more than 2,000 Google Doodles reworking the company logo since 1998, when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin added a Burning Man stick figure to the homepage to let users know they were visiting the festival and thus out of office.
The original Google Doodle, back in 1998, was an “out of office” message while the founders were at Burning Man. Courtesy of Google.
Many artists have been honored with Google Doodles over the years, from bold-faced names such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Keith Haring, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Gustav Klimt, John James Audubon, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo; to pioneering women artists including Anna Ancher, Gabriele Münter, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Hannah Höch, Mihri Müşfik Hanım, Käthe Kollwitz, Leonora Carrington, Baya Fatima Haddad, Meret Oppenheim, and Matilde Pérez.
Eleven years ago today, Google commissioned a guest Doodle from American artist Jeff Koons, featuring a bunch of metallic tulips. The Koons Doodle heralded Google’s now-defunct iGoogle Artist Themes, which allowed users to customize their Google homepage with artistic designs.