Chance Encounters, Edition 52
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Opening this coming week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a large-scale retrospective exhibition of the works of Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013) will provide an opportunity to explore the artist’s life and work. Created in partnership between SFMOMA and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the exhibition covers the artist’s six decade career and will travel to MoMA, New York City, in October, and then to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland over the next two years.
Asawa is best known for her woven wire hangings, but she worked in many media, always experimenting and pushing the possibilities of her materials. The artist first learned to draw as a teen, from fellow detainees during the World War Two incarceration of Japanese Americans. In the late 1940s, she studied at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina, with painter Josef Albers (German-American, 1888-1976) and architect Buckminster Fuller (American, 1895-1983). During that period, Asawa accompanied her mentors and friends, Albers and his wife Anni during a trip to Mexico where she learned the basket-weaving technique that she would use in her wire sculptures for the remainder of her life.
Asawa and her husband, architect Albert Lanier, moved to the San Francisco Bay area where they raised their family of six children. The demands of her large family never stopped Asawa from creating, though she did withdraw from the pressures of the New York gallery scene when her children were small. Janet Bishop, one of the lead curators of the retrospective, said “She did not feel the limitation of expectations for women, and didn’t feel like she needed to make a choice between art and family. Both were incredibly important to her.” One element of the exhibition will be a room recreating part of the artist’s home including her own works and those of other artists who were friends or whose work she admired.
An artist is not a special person. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special. – Ruth Asawa
Working on and with paper were important activities for Asawa. Her first training had been in drawing and it remained a significant aspect of her artistic practice. She drew every day: portraits, images from nature, patterns, and ideas for later projects. The artist had learned origami as a child and incorporated paper folding designs into various aspects of her career, including the public commissions Origami Fountains (1975-76) and Aurora (1984-86), both in San Francisco. In 1965, she was awarded a two-month fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. There she worked with a group of printers to produce 54 lithographs. Of the experience, the artist said, “The excitement of printing has not left me, but I know it would take another lifetime to do it well.”
Asawa recognized the importance of art education for all children and advocated for improved access in schools. The artist also incorporated local communities, especially schools, in the development of her public commissions. For the San Francisco Fountain (1970-1973) and the Japanese American Internment Memorial (1990-1994), Asawa worked with school students and faculty to create reliefs made from simple baker’s clay (flour, salt, and water) which were then cast in bronze. Many of these projects are still to be seen in the Bay Area. (See more examples here.) One result of Asawa’s advocacy for art education was the founding of San Francisco’s first public arts high school in 1982. The school was renamed in the artist’s honor in 2010.
Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into, or whatever occupation. It makes a person broader. – Ruth Asawa
From the 1960s on, Asawa created ceramic masks of friends and visitors to her home. Her children remember coming home from school to discover people lying on the floor with plaster on their faces. Once transferred to clay and fired, these were hung on an exterior wall. Today, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University displays 233 of these masks and some masks will be included in the retrospective.
Excerpts from Ruth Asawa: Of Forms and Growth (1978), produced by Robert Snyder.
Throughout her career, Ruth Asawa merged art and life and the upcoming retrospective will absorb viewers into that art-filled existence.
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective venues and dates:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, April 4–September 2, 2025 ( https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/ruth-asawa-retrospective/)
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, New York, October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026 (https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5768)
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, March 20–September 13, 2026
Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027.
If you are able to visit the exhibition at one of these venues, we hope you’ll share your experiences and observations with us.
Extraordinary work, and to think the start of it was this is beyond remarkable: “The artist first learned to draw as a teen, from fellow detainees during the World War Two incarceration of Japanese Americans.” Thank you for the introduction to Asawa and her art.
She did some interesting things, in so many mediums.