Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
April 5 – September 2, 2025
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, the first major national and international museum retrospective of the groundbreaking work of RUTH ASAWA (1926–2013). Premiering at SFMOMA, this first posthumous retrospective features the entire spectrum of the artist’s awe-inspiring practice. Sculpture, drawings, prints, paintings, design objects and archival material from US-based public and private collections offer an in-depth look at her expansive output and its inspirations, exploring the ways her longtime San Francisco home and garden served as the epicenter of her creative universe, and highlighting the ethos of collaboration and inclusivity that informed her numerous public sculpture commissions and unwavering dedication to arts advocacy.
“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is deeply aligned with SFMOMA’s vision to be both local and global—presenting Bay Area artists with profound significance that also have the potential to be highly impactful and relevant on an international scale,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “This exhibition provides an opportunity to celebrate the legendary Ruth Asawa, who was both a widely acclaimed artist and a hometown inspiration whose impact can be very much felt today.”
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective features more than 300 works spanning six decades of the artist’s career, engaging in the full range of materials and techniques that Asawa employed. Her signature looped-wire sculptures shares gallery space with lesser-known works in other mediums that supply valuable insight into the interconnectedness and relentlessly experimental nature of her artistic vision. In addition to Asawa’s own work, the exhibition includes a select number of works by peers and mentors with whom Ruth Asawa engaged in creative dialogue including Josef Albers, Imogen Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Johnson, Hazel Larsen Archer, Merry Renk and Marguerite Wildenhain.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between SFMOMA and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
“It is an immense privilege to present the full range of Ruth Asawa’s life’s work through this retrospective,” said Janet Bishop. “Not only was Asawa an exceptionally talented artist—among the most distinguished sculptors of the 20th century and a major contributor in so many other mediums—but she lived her values in everything she did, modeling the importance of the arts and opening up creative opportunities for others at every turn.”
RUTH ASAWA RETROSPECTIVE
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective unfolds across more than 14,000 square feet in the Barbara and Gerson Bakar and Mimi and Peter Haas Galleries on SFMOMA’s fourth floor. Following a loosely chronological arc, a dozen sections present Asawa’s extensive body of work within the unfolding narrative of her life and career.
Ruth Asawa was born in Norwalk, California, in 1926 and raised on a farm. In 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were unjustly displaced to incarceration camps, along with many other people of Japanese descent, in the wake of Executive Order 9066. After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. The opening gallery of the exhibition will highlight her highly generative studies at the college from 1946 to 1949. With the encouragement of Black Mountain College teachers including Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Max Dehn, Asawa flourished, creating drawings with undulating lines, repeating patterns and studies of positive and negative space that would resonate in later work. This gallery also features Asawa’s 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, during which she learned a looped-wire technique used for basketry that would prove fundamental to her sculptural practice of the following decade and beyond.
In 1949, Ruth Asawa moved from North Carolina to San Francisco—the city she would call home for the rest of her life—and exhibited at SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) for the first time. A gallery devoted to the 1950s in San Francisco will reveal a decade of tremendous productivity, including the development of the artist’s signature innovation—hanging looped-wire sculptures with forms within forms and interlocking lobes, no two alike—that she exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. An adjacent gallery will include Asawa’s designs for commercial projects including fabric patterns and wallpaper.
In 1962, Ruth Asawa received the gift of a desert plant that inspired her next major body of work: tied-wire sculptures, some wall-mounted, some suspended and some displayed directly on the floor. A gallery focused on nature will examine the artist’s deep affinity with the organic world and its relationship to her practice in both two and three dimensions.
In a shift in register from the unfolding of Asawa’s artistic innovations across time, the exhibition features a gallery evoking the Noe Valley home and studio that was the hub of the artist’s creative and family life for more than half a century, from the early 1960s until her passing in 2013. This section reconvenes a grouping of wire sculptures of various forms and sizes that Asawa is known to have hung from the rafters in her living room, as well as a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and examples of her material experiments in clay, copper, electroplating and bronze. Highlights of the space are Asawa’s original hand-carved redwood doors from the house and works she displayed by other artists, including Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, Peggy Tolk-Watkins and Marguerite Wildenhain.
Another section spanning several decades features the artist’s miniatures: a dozen of her tiniest wire sculptures—the smallest measuring just over one inch in diameter—that are installed in cases that invite close looking. The continued inspiration of the artist’s garden is revealed in a final gallery featuring a stunning array of Asawa’s late drawings of plants, bouquets and flowers produced during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Throughout the retrospective, Asawa’s contemporaneous arts advocacy and public sculpture practice from the 1960s forward are highlighted. Video, photographs, maquettes and archival materials illuminate Asawa’s fountains at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square (Andrea, 1968); Union Square (San Francisco Fountain, 1973); and Bayside Plaza, Embarcadero (Aurora, 1986), as well as projects connected to Japanese American incarceration in San Jose (Japanese American Internment Memorial, 1990–94) and at San Francisco State University (Garden of Remembrance, 2000-02).
RUTH ASAWA RETROSPECTIVE
EXHIBITION VENUES + DATES 2025 - 2027
SFMOMA: April 5–September 2, 2025
MoMA, NY: October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026
Guggenheim Bilbao: March 20–September 13, 2026
Fondation Beyeler: October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027
RUTH ASAWA RETROSPECTIVE - CATALOGUE
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective Edited by Janet Bishop and Cara Manes
Published by SFMOMA / Yale University Press
336 Pages, 9.37 x 12.70 in, 325 color + b-w illustrations
Hadcover - IBSN: 9780300278859
Published: April 2025
An extensively illustrated 336-page catalogue published by SFMOMA in association with Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition. Texts on key aspects of Asawa’s art and creative practice contextualize this visual survey. Lead essayists include Anne Anlin Cheng, Janet Bishop, Cara Manes, and Jennie Yoon and Marci Kwon. Additional contributors include Genji Amino, Isabel Bird, Caitlin Haskell, Charlotte Healy, Corey Keller, Ruth Ozeki, Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Jeffrey Saletnik and Dominika Tylcz.
RUTH ASAWA RETROSPECTIVE - ORGANIZATION
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The exhibition is co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA; with Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Assistant Curator, and William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; and Dominika Tylcz, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
SFMOMA - SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
