Museum Reads: An Art Themed Book Group

Welcome to Museum Reads, the Newport Art Museum’s Art-Themed book group for adults. It’s the same beloved Read/Eat/Chat book group format, with a fresh name. Join us!

Ruth Asawa’s remarkable life as an American sculptor is recounted in this compelling biography. Through this well-researched work we see examples of Asawa’s work and the unconventional path she took throughout her life.

We are delighted that author Marilyn Chase will join us in conversation virtually!

Book group this month will meet at the Museum as well as virtually on Zoom.

About the Author

Author, journalist, teacher Marilyn Chase was born in Los Angeles, attending public school as a nerd in the sun-struck surf, sports and car culture of Southern California. Graduating with honors in English literature from Stanford University, Chase earned a Master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.

After more than two decades as a reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, focusing on health science, she returned to independent writing and teaching.  She has taught narrative writing at her alma mater Stanford, as well as news, health, business and narrative writing as a Continuing Lecturer for her grad school at U.C. Berkeley.

Her previous book, The Barbary Plague: the Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, told the struggle of a young public health doctor to quell an outbreak of bubonic plague and treat patients in the city’s Chinatown in 1900 against backdrop of virulent racism, scapegoating and epidemic coverup by politicians and big business.

Chase’s current book, Everything She Touched: the Life of Ruth Asawa, tells the story of a determined young artist who rebounds after being imprisoned in WWII for her Japanese American roots. Rejecting victimhood, she makes sculpture of unsurpassed originality and enhances the lives of thousands of children by infusing art into the public schools. While distinct, Asawa’s story taps into a fundamental theme present in Chase’s earlier work.  Both recount a hero’s journey in arts or sciences, prevailing over ignorance and oppression to heal, to create and to make us all heirs to a more beautiful and humane world.

Chase is married to physician Randolph Chase.  She lives in San Francisco.