A Life of Art

Few artists have blazed their own trail like Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). She ignored artistic hierarchies to forge a groundbreaking art practice. She balanced her career with raising six children. She sought arts education for all and lived as she created: without boundaries or a roadmap, with courage and integrity.

Asawa’s work has frequently graced SFMOMA’s galleries since she arrived in San Francisco in 1949, including the important group exhibition Four Artist-Craftsmen (featuring all women) in 1954 and her mid-career survey in 1973. “In the years since, the appreciation for her work has only grown,” says Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator. “With a posthumous perspective on the artist, it seemed clear that Asawa merited a major retrospective that would bring the full breadth and depth of her practice to today’s audiences.”

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective follows a loose chronology, from her student years at Black Mountain College through her mature decades in San Francisco. Encompassing the intricate suspended wire sculptures for which she is best known, bronze casts, clay masks, paperfolds, drawings, prints, and documentation of her public sculpture and work with schoolchildren, the 300-plus artworks on view provide a comprehensive picture of her significant contributions to twentieth-century art.

Early Life

Born to first-generation Japanese immigrant parents in Norwalk, California, southeast of Los Angeles, Asawa split her childhood years between school and working on the family fruit and vegetable farm. In 1941, when Asawa was fifteen, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, thrusting the U.S. into World War II and setting off a wave of hostility and unfounded fear towards Japanese Americans. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all people of Japanese descent across the western U.S. “evacuated” into mandatory inland detention camps. Asawa’s father was arrested in 1942 and imprisoned, while the remaining Asawas in the U.S. reported to the temporary assembly center at Santa Anita Racetrack, leaving their farm behind and sleeping in repurposed horse stables, before being transported to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. While Asawa and some of her siblings were permitted early release to attend college, other family members remained incarcerated until 1945.

At Santa Anita, she took drawing classes from three Walt Disney animators who were also detained there. At Rohwer, she continued art classes and sketched portraits of her peers for student yearbooks. Hoping to become an art teacher, Asawa enrolled at Milwaukee State Teachers College, financing her schooling through scholarships and house-keeping jobs. However, the college declined to assign her a student teaching position, citing concerns about her race, so she was unable to graduate. Changing course, Asawa followed friends to an unaccredited experimental liberal arts school called Black Mountain College.

Black Mountain College

Although Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, did not award degrees, its radically democratic approach to learning and art making attracted some of the period’s greatest creative minds to teach and study. Says Bishop, “Asawa absolutely thrived within the multi-disciplinary context, and it was there that she solidified her determination to become an artist.”

In 1947, Asawa joined professors Josef and Anni Albers—renowned German artist émigrés from the Bauhaus design school—on their sabbatical in Mexico, where she learned to weave baskets by looping wire during a service project in the city of Toluca. Back on campus, she made Untitled (S.363) (ca. 1948), using the hand-looping tech­nique that, endlessly iterated upon and expanded, would become the foundation of her signature wire sculptures.

At Black Mountain, she joined a circle of artists including Ray Johnson and Hazel Larsen Archer (whose portraits of Asawa are on view in the exhibition), but one fellow student stuck with her for life: the architect Albert Lanier, whom she married in 1949, despite disapproval of their interracial union from both of their families.

Faculty member and visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller designed her wedding ring—on view in the exhibition—with a motif of interlocking letter A’s for Asawa. Before they wed, Josef Albers implored Lanier, “Don’t ever let her stop doing her work.” Lanier found employ­ment in an architecture firm in San Francisco, where he and Asawa made their permanent home.

1950s: Early San Francisco

Asawa’s practice exploded during her first decade in San Francisco. With their airy elegance and modernist sensibility, her hanging wire sculptures gradually attracted the atten­tion of galleries, collectors, museums, and even department stores. Works from this period, produced for the Peridot Gallery in New York as well as for occasional local group shows, demonstrate her seemingly infinite creativity, nurtured alongside a growing family (she and Lanier had six children born between 1950 and 1959).

“Her ability to envision and execute such complex forms within forms is mind-blowing,” says Bishop. Untitled (S.114) (1958), in SFMOMA’s collection, demonstrates the level of complexity she achieved with looped wire.

She also experimented with other materials, making reliefs by folding paper, and prints from apples and potatoes. Though critics in the 1950s received her art warmly, they struggled to define it, often exoticizing her Asian heritage or emphasizing her domesticity, dismissing the work as merely decorative. “Asawa was very non-hierarchical,” says Bishop, “with inspiration coming from craft traditions, fine art, and many other places.” The flouting of conventions she learned at Black Mountain made her art both powerfully distinctive and difficult to categorize.

The Noe Valley House, 1960–2013

In 1960, after moving around San Francisco for a decade, the Asawa-Lanier family purchased a 1908 Arts and Crafts–style house in Noe Valley with plenty of space for art making. This section of the exhibition opens with the set of redwood doors that Asawa carved for the front entrance and displays a selection of clay life masks she cast of friends and family that were mounted on the house’s exterior. It also features a group of wire sculptures that were suspended from the living room rafters and works by friends that hung on the walls.

“Everything Asawa did was interconnected,” says Bishop. “She always had her studio at home so that her children knew what she did, and she could be there for them and encourage their own creative pursuits.” In a 2020 interview with The Telegraph, her daughter, Aiko, recalls her parents telling her and her siblings to “‘Go make something’ . . . if we said we were bored.”

In fact, Asawa began advocating heavily for arts education in public schools starting in the late 1960s, driven by her strong belief in the importance of nurturing chil­dren’s creativity. She co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in 1968, bringing professional artists into classrooms to facilitate activities, using any recycled and inexpensive materials they could scrounge up. After years of doggedly lobbying local government, Asawa was instrumental in founding San Francisco’s first public arts high school in 1982, which now bears her name.

1960s: Inspired by Nature

Asawa was a committed gardener throughout her life, nurturing a deep connection with nature that infused her art. Inspired by the world around her, “she always carried a sketchbook, filling page after page with what she saw, from sleeping people to plants and flowers from the garden,” says Bishop.

In 1962, Asawa received a gift of a desert plant that spurred an innovation in her sculpture: the tied-wire technique. “These works were made by bundling multiple lengths of wire together, bending them, and splaying them out to create branch-like forms,” explains Bishop. Some variations were wall-mounted, while others were hung or placed on tabletops or on the floor.

An adjacent gallery highlights her hugely productive 1965 residency at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which gave her time and space to explore a new medium. “She took full advantage of the opportunity,” says Bishop, “working with a team of master printers to create more than fifty highly experimental, often vibrantly colored prints with subjects ranging from portraits, pigeons, and plane trees to many, many florals,” such as Poppy (1965).

1970s and Beyond: Later Sculpture

Asawa continued to refine and expand her sculptural practice as the years wore on. “Remarkably, she never repeated herself,” says Bishop. “Between the various types, colors, and gauges of wire she used, and endless variation of form, each wire sculpture is unique. They are so awe-inspiring, and really reward close looking.”

She never stopped trying new materials. Untitled (S.100) (1978) shows her incorporating stained glass to create a chromatic effect within one of her hanging tied-wire forms.

Through sketches, sculptures, and archival materials, the exhibition highlights Asawa’s highly collaborative public works to which she devoted much of her attention from the late 1960s onward, from Andrea (1966–68) at Ghirardelli Square to the Garden of Remembrance (2000–2002), her last public work, at San Francisco State University. The poster included with this magazine maps the locations of these works and others.

1990s and 2000s: Late Floral Drawings

As sculpting in wire became more challenging and taxing (a serious bout with lupus compromised her dexterity), she focused on drawing and painting. Hung salon-style in the last gallery of the exhibition, these poignant and beautiful works on paper show her returning to the natural motifs that always inspired her, depicting fruits and flowers from her garden and floral arrangements from friends and loved ones, such as Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers).

Interspersed with archival materials, including touching photographs of Asawa at work and at home by longtime friend and eminent photographer Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective illuminates the many ways she brought art into every aspect of her life. Even longtime fans will discover new sides of this formidable artist. “Her practice was truly expansive,” marvels Bishop, “much more so than I realized when we started working on the show five years ago.” Don’t miss the opportunity to experience the life and work of the iconic Ruth Asawa.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is on view from April 5 through September 2, 2025, on Floor 4.