Star sculptor Ruth Asawa gets her first posthumous retrospective

The more you learn about the late Bay Area artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), the remarkable nature of her life and career becomes increasingly clear. Now the Japanese-American sculptor, painter and printmaker is getting her first posthumous retrospective, with an international exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and that of New York Museum of Modern Art.

The show was five years in the making, featuring more than 300 works of art, including the intricate hanging sculptures with wire loops that Asawa is best known for. The exhibition also features her works in a wide range of other media, including drawing, printmaking, paper folding, and the many public sculptures still on display in the Bay Area.

“People will be really surprised when they see what else she’s done,” said Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture. “She was someone who was ruthlessly creative. Everything she did, she did in her own way.”

“Ruth Asawa is an artist who is super exciting because of the seamless integration of her art practice into her life. The material exploration was relentless and she was an avid supporter of the arts, who was instrumental in bringing art education into Bay Area schools,” added Cara Manes, MoMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture.

The artist grew up on a farm in Norwalk, California, until high school, when the government forced her family to move to a Japanese internment camp, first in California and later in Arkansas.

Asawa began studying art in college and studied at the famous Black Mountain College outside Asheville, North Carolina, with Jozef Albers And Buckminster Fuller from 1946 to ’49. It was a fruitful time for the young artist, as she began to adopt the line-based visual language and techniques that would characterize her work for the next six decades, including learning wire braiding in Toluca, Mexico, in 1947.

After school, Asawa married one of her fellow students, the architect Albert Lanier. The two moved to San Francisco, where they would raise six children – two adopted, four biological – and live for the rest of their lives.

“When Ruth arrived in San Francisco, she was still in her early twenties. She knew she wanted to have a big family, and she knew she wanted to have a career, and it was important to her that those things were integrated,” Bishop said. “She didn’t feel the limitation of expectations for women, and didn’t feel like she had to make a choice between art and family. Both were incredibly important to her.”

Asawa worked tirelessly and reportedly slept only four hours a night. When the children were in bed, she did work. And her unique practice was shaped by the realities of childcare.

“Unlike, for example, working with oil paint, where it is more difficult to put something down and then go to the kitchen and tend the pot of soup, she deliberately worked with materials that could be put down and picked up again,” Bishop said .

Asawa’s woven sculptures were sometimes dismissed as belonging to the domain of craft or women’s work. ART news review called them ‘domestic’ sculptures in a feminine, handmade mode.’

Nevertheless, she secured representation in New York with Louis Pollack. He gave her three solo exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in the 1950s, until Asawa decided to distance himself. (The retrospective includes works she showed in New York.)

“She started to have a kind of market career. She got commissions,” Manes said. “Her children were toddlers or newborns at the time. She just made the decision to focus on other things and not have to meet the demands of this fast-growing market that was placed in front of her.”

That market would remain largely dormant for decades, until just months before Asawa’s death, when one of her works sold for a price. $1.4 million at Christie’s New York. Her profile has continued to rise in the more than ten years since, with mega gallery David Zwirner contract representation of the estate in 2017. (Her current auction record of $5.3 million according to the film took place at Christie’s New York in 2020 Artnet price database.)

But although she did not pursue world fame in art during her lifetime, Asawa remained committed to her practice. Her sculptures, with their interlocking lobes and nested shapes, remain immediately recognizable, despite each being unique. SFMOMA gave Asawa a mid-career retrospective in 1973, and she became known throughout the city for her public monuments.

Some of these projects were collaborations with children, where they learned to sculpt with baker’s clay made from flour, salt and water. For San Francisco FountainOutside the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Asawa worked with children across the city to model the small scenes in relief sculpture for a drum-like basin she had cast in bronze.

Asawa began working with children because of her passionate belief in arts education. She co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop, which eventually grew into a citywide commitment to arts education in San Francisco public schools. She championed the creation of a dedicated School of the Arts in 1982, which was renamed in her honor in 2010.

The exhibition will delve deeper into Asawa’s incredible work with the community, but will also remain rooted in her home and studio in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. One of the galleries will be inspired by the space, with the home’s nine-foot carved redwood doors placed at the entrance.

“She lived the work she created – and that of others important to her, through friends and mentors like Joseph Albers,” Manes said. “We are planning a gallery that really communicates this seamlessness between living and making art, living and art, and between home and studio.”

“Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, from April 4 to September 2, 2025; the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, New York, October 19, 2025 – February 7, 2026; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, March 20 – September 13, 2026; and Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 18, 2026 – January 24, 2027.