Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

03.19.2026 - 09.13.2026

Dates: March 19 to September 13, 2026
Organizers: 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). This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Curators: Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, in collaboration with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

- The works featured in this exhibition include Ruth Asawa’s best known suspended looped-wire sculptures and her nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, as well as clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints ranging from 1947 to 2006.

- Asawa’s work challenges distinctions between abstraction and representation, figure and ground, and negative and positive space, and invites us to contemplate how disparate elements interact in a composition, which in turn engages with its surroundings.

- In the early 1950s, Asawa’s unyielding search for new possibilities within her chosen processes resulted in her signature sculptural motif: a “continuous form within a form,” which she described as “a shape that was inside and outside at the same time.”

- Asawa’s tied-wire works often began with a floral, starlike, or geometric center; and as she worked, and the form grew progressively outward, she both responded to the properties of her medium in following “what the wire dictates” and mirrored patterns in the natural world.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao proudly presents Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, an ambitious exhibition devoted to an iconic artist, Ruth Aiko Asawa (born Norwalk, California, 1926; died San Francisco, California, 2013) in the year that would have been her 100th birthday.

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