As it turns out, the looped-wire technique evades easy historicizing: Beyond the scholarship on Asawa, where it’s typically glossed over, it has not received scholarly attention in Mexico (to the best of my knowledge), let alone abroad, making a thorough comparative study unattainable. In my three years of researching the subject, I have found that the technique’s history splits meanders, and disappears only to restart elsewhere, frustrating questions of its origin, authorship, and history. This essay presents new scholarship on the Mexican wire baskets and considers their manifold variants side by side with Asawa’s work, aiming to restore the dialogue between the basketmakers and the artist. In examining the varying interpretations of the same formal gesture across traditions and across time, we can begin to notice how through tending to the technical aspect of making—the site of convergence of the material, the embodied knowledge of making, and the artist’s intention—art history can recover shared modes of thinking between diverse practitioners, artistic genres, and cultural contexts, even as the meaning of the technique itself is renegotiated by each user. The looped-wire technique can guide us in this endeavor with its nonlinear history and modular morphology, which afforded a matrix for volume-building that remains porous and transparent to both the eye and the mind, cuing the beholder to the inner workings of its structure. 

Asawa’s encounter with the looped-wire baskets was framed by her three-year-long involvement with Black Mountain College, a progressive liberal arts college in North Carolina. She arrived there in 1946 after a series of discriminatory events set in motion in 1942—when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorized the forced displacement of all people of Japanese descent from the West Coast and their subsequent confinement in “relocation centers” farther inland—and culminating in being denied graduation by the Milwaukee State Teachers College on racial grounds after she had nearly completed her art-teaching degree.³ In Milwaukee, Asawa had become well versed in various art disciplines—from pottery, jewelry, and basic weaving to drawing, painting, and printing. Her initial plan at Black Mountain was to study weaving with Anni Albers, which may indicate that an early affinity for fibrous materials and textile structures. Due to time considerations, however, she enrolled in two foundational courses taught by Josef Albers (1888–1976). In her course notes from 1946, Asawa recorded Albers’s theories on structure, form, pattern, surface, and color. Her notebook abounds in modernist credos that might have laid the conceptual groundwork for her subsequent abstract reinterpretation of the looped-wire technique: “Design=clarity,” “to achieve something with nothing,” “not form but surface.”⁴ Wire appeared among structural case studies led by Albers, who demonstrated a transformation of a two-dimensional line into a curved three-dimensional shape with a pliable strand of wire.⁵ 

In 1947, at the conclusion of her first year at Black Mountain, Asawa traveled to Toluca in central Mexico, where she spent around two months teaching arts and crafts at a local school. Throughout that time, she lived in Altos del Mercado on Calle Independencia in the heart of the city, where once a week, she would inevitably find herself amidst a sprawling tianguis, or open-air market.⁶ Every Friday, Toluca was home to the largest craft market in the region, attracting artists from all over the state of Mexico (fig. 1). The quality, concentration, and range of craft wares also appealed to modern artists from the capital, among them Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), who periodically frequented it, sometimes with her students from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda,” a Mexican art school that Asawa briefly attended two summers before her visit to Toluca.⁷ 

Among the objects Asawa saw at the market were serapes, rebozos, ceramics, and of course baskets of all kinds. She recounted years later: “I actually learned how to make wire baskets in Mexico, in Toluca. They would make all kinds of shapes, little chickens, etc. I learned the technique then but didn’t know what would happen. I liked the idea of it and later I just went with it.”⁸ Unfortunately, the artist left virtually no details about the identity of the person who shared the technique with her. From one late account, we glean that it was a teacher associated with the school where Asawa volunteered and that the act of teaching was in fact part of a circle of exchanges. Asawa recalled, “We taught them what we knew and they taught us what they knew,” describing a reciprocal transmission of technical knowledge.⁹ In another interview, she pointed to a group of makers and acknowledged their experimentation: “They were experimenting with wire at that time to make a basket for eggs. And that’s what they taught us.”¹⁰ Interestingly, the artist did not always present this imparting of knowledge as reciprocal. In 1955, in a Guggenheim fellowship application, she wrote that she had been “shown a crude form of a technique of looping wire into a basket.”¹¹ Persuaded by the demands of the fellowship, which dictated a narrative revolving around innovation and artistic originality—conceptual prerequisites for writing an artist into the canon—Asawa delegated the technique to a “beginning of an idea,” one subordinate to the larger story of sculptural experimentation. The subsequent writing on Asawa’s work would follow this teleological path, and thus a formal innovation in the realm of craft was superseded with one in the field of art. But 50 years later, in the interviews quoted above, Asawa painted a different picture, one in which the idea itself is materially rooted, and therefore, her relationship with her teacher(s) matters more—as if the decades of working with the technique, resulting in a sculptural taxonomy of an unparalleled formal complexity, made the experience of learning all the more valuable. 

In my own short trip to Toluca in 2023, I was not able to find any contemporary practitioners still using a looped-wire method.¹² It is likely the technique died out before the 1980s, as a catalogue of Mexico state craft traditions from 1984 doesn’t list any other wire arts besides figurines constructed of cut, bent, and twisted wire, which are now made by a single artist, Crisóforo Mejía.¹³ Thus the absence of comparative studies of Asawa’s work and the baskets can be partially attributed to the scarcity of the practice in the past 20 years. There are, however, extant examples of wire baskets dating from the mid-20th century that remain in central Mexico in private collections (figs. 2, 3). Considering the provenance, date, and crucially, the chicken form of these objects, which was recalled by the artist decades later, it is likely that Asawa learned the technique for making exactly this kind of basket.

In each of the two Tolucan chicken baskets I came across, the bottom features a central near-circle that continues into a wide spiral. After a second round encircling the hollow center, the wire changes direction and starts forming evenly and sparsely distributed loops that thread through the preceding row of the spiral. The loops are stacked on top of each other, wider end down, radiating outward and creating multiple columns of varying lengths until the surface shifts to build upward, following a regular pattern of evenly spaced columns of loops. The long bridges between the loops form a pattern of rhythmic, horizontal stripes. In the extended neck attached to the basket’s body, the loops are more tightly arranged, and the arches between them nearly disappear. Due to its density, the neck segment corresponds most directly to Asawa’s sculptures. The chicken baskets, however, combine an array of wire applications: Beyond the two different versions of looped wire, the handle is made out of coiled and bent wire, and the lid is attached with a hinge. The basket artists arrived at the qualities of movement, pliability, resistance, and structural soundness through variations in wire manipulation.

After learning the technique in Toluca, presumably from the sparse looping of the chicken baskets, Asawa returned to North Carolina and began experiments that led to significant modifications. She shortened the bridge between columns and tightened the loops to “make baskets whose mesh was of a uniform consistency—whose shapes were roughly symmetrical and reasonably firm for handling.”¹⁴ Her loops were larger, each one clearly showing the hollow teardrop outline. In one of Asawa’s earliest extant works, Untitled (S.363, Freestanding Basket; fig. 4), the downward-facing direction of the loops corresponds to the structure of the chicken baskets. Soon after, Asawa flipped the direction of her loops, and all of her subsequent sculptures follow the same pattern of loops growing rhythmically, with their wider end facing up. The outcome of her explorations is a pliable, uniform surface made of evenly spaced loops. In her modified looped-wire technique, the emphasis is placed on the loop itself, which is magnified and multiplied, becoming the basic unit from which her sculptural compositions emerge. Through tightened rows and larger loops, the artist was able to draw out the negative space in the loops’ eyes and foreground continuity and rhythmic repetition as key formal concepts in her abstract wire works. While the Tolucan chicken baskets display a variety of creative approaches in handling wire—and favor eclecticism and whimsy—Asawa’s meshes consist of a distilled iterative operation aimed at modularity and consistency.

The Tolucan looped-wire technique doesn’t bear immediate resemblance to any other basketmaking tradition in Mexico, having seemingly sprouted in response to the properties of the material itself—presumably after it became more available. Its technical separation from other basket-weaving techniques corresponds to its absence in the folk art collection of the Tolucan Museo de Arte Popular (now defunct), which opened its doors a few years prior to Asawa’s arrival in Toluca and was a place she visited during her stay.¹⁵ This omission suggests that wire basketwork was not considered an example of a folk art or craft but rather looked upon as a trade (una manualidad or un oficio). There are traces of other wire baskets made in Mexico, whose blurry provenance makes them difficult to date, that adopt the same looping strategy to crafting a vessel. A cylindrical looped-wire basket, reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Black Mountain College and Mexico (2023), offers a window into a variant of looped-wire basketry that is more akin to Asawa’s uniform mesh, but unfortunately, little is known about its date or geographic range, let alone its creator (fig. 5).¹⁶ 

Based on Asawa’s account of multiple wire market basket forms, it is possible that nonfigurative shapes were produced by the same wire artists making the chicken-shaped ones. A photograph dated to 1951 from the Nacho López photographic library documents coiled wire baskets sold in Mexico City. It shows a stack of empty wire vessels, whose concentric rings coil around to form a gourd-like shape, resting on top of metal utensils—cups, graters, even a funnel—offered by a street vendor. In the background, a woman smiles at the camera from behind the wares. Is she the one who made the coiled baskets? And is there any connection, besides the similarity of material, to the looped ones from Toluca? For now, the photograph, which resides in the collection of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, broadens the constellation of wire creations from mid-century Mexico.

Wire, an extruded metal product, is an inherently modern material that also signals and enacts modernization. In the 1940s, the preoccupation with the look and meaning of the modern was topical to social and economic transformations globally. From the scarce record available on the creation and use of the Tolucan basket as well as Asawa’s own recollections, its primary function was to carry and protect its contents, often eggs. The open structure afforded a view into its interior, and the hen shape commented on it, introducing whimsy to its user’s daily goings-on. 

Wire baskets extended an aesthetic of a quintessential craft object into a modern material, giving a new feeling and appearance to a quotidian item. But unlike the Bauhaus designer-craftsmen, Tolucan basketmakers did not concern themselves with industrial production. By reducing the amount of raw material used and simplifying the structure, the basket artists could produce viable vessels with less manual labor and therefore more quickly. They made expert use of the unique structural possibilities of wire, emphasizing spare construction over similarity to other basketry idioms. The result—the wire basket—could be seen as a modernist object par excellence, a perfect synergy of material and form, and yet it was not conceived in that spirit. Though no testimony is available, the basket’s pliability (which comes at a cost to its longevity) and its figurative shape (which, in the case of the chicken basket, humorously alludes to its contents) suggest an affective relationship with the user that’s meant to elicit joy beyond aesthetic pleasure.

The industrial origin of wire might also provide insight into potential birthplaces of metal basketry within Mexico. In the 1940s, Mexican industrial wire production and metal factories were concentrated in the north (in and around Monterrey), with the notable exception of the capital.¹⁷ (It is noteworthy that in the 1880s, Toluca already boasted a small foundry on Calle de Plutarco González.¹⁸) Locally made metal products were a cheaper alternative to products made of imported processed metal and therefore enabled a flourishing of a craft using this industrial material. Wire baskets could have arisen nearly synchronously in multiple locales across Mexico, but Toluca was certainly a center of production and distribution of looped-wire containers in the 1940–60s. In addition to its abundant craft market and its own public folk art collection, Toluca was also a center of trade education on account of the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (EDAYO), a vocational school dating back to the 19th century that aimed at professional training and integration of Indigenous and mixed populations. Perhaps due to the variety of workshops at EDAYO, wire was among the supplies purchased regularly by the school as early as 1903 and through the 1940s.¹⁹ Wire baskets sold at the Tolucan market also made their way to craft markets in Mexico City, such as Anexo de la Merced, as discovered by Marta Turok, an anthropologist and curator at Museo Franz Mayer, through conversations with the historic market sellers.²⁰ This large distribution area demonstrates the considerable popularity of the wire baskets and also implies that they must have been produced by multiple individuals to satisfy the demand. 

Asawa left us another clue: In a late interview, she recalled that “it was a European thing,” suggesting the practice had its roots in a European craft.²¹ When explaining its construction, she often compared the looped-wire technique to crocheting. This could possibly link the Mexican wire basketry to the Central European drotárstvo, a robust tradition of a wide range of wire-related techniques harking back to the 19th-century territory of present-day Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Although primarily using cut wire, drotári, (or wire craftsmen), sometimes incorporated wire net elements. Interestingly, drotárstvo was traditionally associated with a peripatetic lifestyle in which wire was seen as a malleable material capable of delivering quick repairs and enabling a way of working untethered from trade and place specificity.²² One may wonder whether any drotári arrived in Mexico in the late 19th century, spreading this itinerant and creatively untrammeled approach to building with wire. Though both techniques share the logic of building with a single thread, the elongated construction of the Tolucan chicken wire baskets shows little connection to crocheting. The identity of the originators and the inspirations that led to the looped-wire technique might not be knowable at this stage of scholarship. 

The story of looped wire doesn’t end with the disappearance of the looped-wire basket artists from Toluca. Even though Tolucan production waned in the second half of the 20th century, it spawned enough memorable and cherished objects to suffuse the region with baskets and even to reach beyond the northern border. Through tourist purchases and robust networks of export, many chicken baskets made their way to flea markets in large cities like San Francisco. Wire basketry also sprang up in a different form in the northern state of Sonora among the Yoreme-Mayo people, with production peaking in the 1990s and now in decline. According to field research by artist and educator Indira Urrutia, the tradition of wire basketry based on loops spans at least two generations and, decades ago, provided economic support for many families in the village of Masiaca thanks to an interested exporter from the United States.²³ The Sonoran baskets vary in their shapes and looping pattern, and they employ a range of wire gauges. An example of this form of basketwork entered the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (INPI) collection, a recognition of the importance of basketry for the Yoreme-Mayo community (fig. 7). Some contemporary practitioners of drotárstvo also employ loops to make webbed surfaces in their objects. 

In the artistic context, the looped-wire technique provided Asawa with a perfect medium for a whole slate of artistic interests, from biomorphic forms, already seen in her early drawings and collages, to repetition, transparency, linearity, and modular compositions. The original basket weavers transformed containers into transparent skeletal structures, which Asawa then exploded into an infinitely expansive matrix. As she closed her first looped-wire sculptures, in works such as Untitled (S.264, Hanging Two-Lobed, Single-Layered Continuous Form; fig. 8), she also turned the basket forms themselves into loops, feeding one vessel shape into the next one. 

For Asawa, the shape of a loop provided an entry point into a lifetime of exploration of connection between seeming opposites. The beginning and end intersect in her sculptures as do the inside and outside, the latter rendered obsolete by the porosity of the surface. She was acutely aware of the link between her forms and the technique, which also provided her with a foothold in bridging drawing and sculpture: “All my wire sculptures are made from the same loop. And there’s only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape. That shape comes out working with the wire. You don’t think ahead of time, this is what I want. You work on it as you go along. You make the line, a two-dimensional line, then you go into space, and you have a three-dimensional piece. It’s like a drawing in space.”²⁴

In her 1952 Guggenheim Fellowship application, Asawa wrote that her works have their “way of growing,” pointing to a material intelligence embedded in the technique.²⁵ This kind of dialogue with matter is one of the distinguishing features of craft, which traditionally acknowledges the back-and-forth between the maker and the object, negating the assumed passivity of matter.²⁶ According to early 20th-century sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss, technique is an embodied, cultural action that is both “effective and traditional,” meaning it produces results and needs to be taught.²⁷ In her Guggenheim statement quoted above, Asawa acknowledges the technique as an actor defining the actionable horizon, a gesture through which her work exists in the same continuum as other looped-wire mesh objects.²⁸ Yet it is her attunement to the ways of growing, coupled with her artistic proclivities, that ultimately led to the rigorous, complex and interconnected universe of sculptural forms that visualize the near-infinite possibilities of the said continuum. 

In her book Textile Techniques in Metal: For Jewelers, Textile Artists and Sculptors (1975), Arline Fisch positions Asawa within a complex landscape of metalworkers: jewelers, basketmakers, and industrial designers but also sculptors, including Kazuko Yamanaka (Japanese, born 1946) and Dawn Macnutt (Canadian, born 1937).²⁹ Fisch’s book not only charts a multitude of technical variants to building with metal strands but also teaches the basics of most of the discussed methods. Asawa embraced this kind of maker’s transparency in her work. In 2009, she donated an unfinished sample piece along with a springlike coiled strand of wire, a dowel, and a spool of wire to the Oakland Museum of California (fig. 9). Taken together, these objects demystify the technique that came to be synonymous with her sculpture and offer visual tools to conceptualize it on one’s own. In a statement from 1970, Asawa notes that “crafts have built-in opportunities: They offer learning by trial and error, learning basic principles to staying alive.”³⁰ This wholehearted dedication to sharing the experience of learning was a hallmark of Asawa’s practice, which encompassed decades of active arts teaching and extended to her own sculptural language. Indeed, in her lifetime, she offered abundant explanations and even taught the looped-wire technique in workshops. Over the course of her career, Asawa coined a philosophy of “completing the circle—learn something, apply it, pass it on.”³¹ In this model, skills, knowledge, and perhaps technical ideas too exist in a circuit of sharing, branching out into an ever-evolving network as they are practiced.

Across time, the looped-wire technique resisted codification and categorizations. As Briony Fer reminds us, “The tropes of weaving, plaiting, braiding—all those processes embedded in the pliable plane—create the conditions for a different way of conceiving a modern relation between work and world, one rooted in the everyday and the handmade.”³² The multifarious wire baskets revise the idea of modernity in craft terms: By considering a traditional form in a modern material, these objects insist on continuity through reinvention. It is precisely the notion of continuity that divides the realms of craft and modern art, but curiously, it’s continuity itself that becomes materialized in the looped-wire technique—a sinuous yet unbroken line conjuring a volume. That quality also preoccupied Asawa in her practice both formally and over time. In focusing on breakthroughs and singular artistic lineages, we lose sight of the larger polyphonic and transnational ensemble of practitioners using the looped-wire technique to construct vessels. In the face of absent records about the basketmakers and the associations the objects carried for Mexican users, the extant works themselves must guide any attempt to write a history of the wire basketry. To imagine a wider picture, one in which connections between the manifold ways of making with looped wire converge into a stream, requires open questions and a more speculative approach, which I have taken in this essay.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for Figures 1 and 6 in this article. If you hold the rights to any of the material used and have not been contacted, please reach out to contact_c-map@moma.org so that proper credit can be attributed or the material removed.

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