Commercial Designs, early 1950s

In the early 1950s Asawa took classes in dance, commercial design, lettering, screenprinting, and painting at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). In these years her work continued to gain local and national attention through exhibitions at the San Francisco and New York showrooms of the interior design company Laverne Originals, and in publications including Vogue.

During this period Asawa made a range of designs for commercial work, including plastic panels based on her paperfolds and wallpaper and textile patterns incorporating logarithmic spiral forms, the Black Mountain College (BMC) laundry stamp, and the footprints of her young children. Although Laverne Originals invited Asawa to mass-produce her looped-wire baskets as home decor, she declined. She explained: “I am interested in producing to sell, but the more I work the more ideas I get and I want to experiment, but experimenting is not producing, since there are always many flops.”