Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

Ruth Asawa (b. 1926, Norwalk, California; d. 2013, San Francisco, California) was one of the most uniquely gifted and productive artists to emerge in the postwar era in the United States. Raised on a farm in Southern California, the teenage Asawa and her family were incarcerated in Japanese American internment camps in 1942. By 1946, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. She thrived in the school’s intense and creative atmosphere, where the encouragement of her teachers, including Josef Albers, pushed her to explore the possibilities of ordinary materials, including stamps, leaves, paper, and eventually wire.

Among her early innovations are her suspended looped-wire sculptures: sinewy, sensuous, and transparent forms that explore repetition, shape, shadows, and space. In 1949, Asawa moved to San Francisco, and broadened her range of three-dimensional work with complex tied-wire sculptures that suggest organic structures such as flowers, roots, trees, and nervous systems, as well as electroplated and cast bronze works, paintings, prints, and drawings. By the late 1960s, Asawa was well-known in the San Francisco Bay Area for her public art commissions, advocacy for arts education, and her civic leadership. While the appreciation of Asawa’s work has grown exponentially in the last decade, this retrospective will be the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s exquisite, varied, and groundbreaking practice.