Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

Accessing the Exhibition

This website offers visual descriptions of a selection of artworks and objects from Ruth Asawa’s life, along with exhibition text and descriptive wayfinding. Though not all the artworks in the exhibition are described, each gallery contains three to four described artworks and, in some instances, clusters of described artworks.

In this exhibition, you will find the following features:

Tactile QR codes in the galleries can be used to access this website at any point. The tactile QR codes are located at the introductory text of each gallery and at each described artwork or artwork cluster.
The visual description overviews of each gallery will indicate how many QR codes to expect in each space.
All hanging sculptures are installed above cane detectible low plinths.
Dual tactile floor strips indicate the locations of tactile QR codes. The floor markers are located a foot away from the perimeter walls of the galleries.

You can scan each QR code associated with the artwork you are in front of or scroll down to the content on this page.

Wall Text

“An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

—Ruth Asawa

Unfolding across twelve galleries that span the arc of a six-decade-long career, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective traces the full breadth and depth of the innovative and multifaceted practice of a San Francisco icon. An artist, educator, and arts advocate, Asawa integrated her creative work with all aspects of her life. This interconnectedness is illuminated in photographs and archival materials presented alongside and in response to the works featured here, from the suspended looped-wire sculptures for which she is best known to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints.

Ruth Aiko Asawa (born Norwalk, California, 1926; died San Francisco, 2013) was the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant farmers. During World War II, she and her family were forcibly incarcerated by the US government under Executive Order 9066 because of their Japanese ancestry. Asawa’s connection with San Francisco, and SFMOMA, can be traced to 1949, when she settled here with her future husband, architect Albert Lanier, whom she had met at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental, arts-centered school where she studied after the war. The two would marry, live, and work here for the rest of their lives. Asawa’s work was first shown at SFMOMA in 1949, and during her lifetime she participated in some thirty exhibitions here, most notably a mid-career survey in 1973.

This exhibition charts Asawa’s formidable legacy as it built over time, highlighting not only her radical formal innovations, ceaseless material experimentation, and generous worldview but also the key concepts, places, and people around which her art revolved. Today public commissions by Asawa can be found throughout San Francisco, from the Embarcadero, Union Square, and Ghirardelli Square to the Mission District, Japantown, and San Francisco State University. And bearing her name is the city’s public arts high school she worked to establish, the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. Reflecting on the community in which her remarkable creative practice unfolded, Asawa once said, “I invested in the city of San Francisco,” a choice that can be felt here to this day.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the invaluable support of the estate of Ruth Asawa. It is a living testament to Asawa that her generosity of spirit and creativity ripples through subsequent generations, to whom we are profoundly grateful.

Object

Untitled (S.046a-d, Hanging Group of Four, Two-Lobed Forms)

Label Text

1961
Copper and brass wire
Collection of Diana Nelson and John Atwater, promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Visual Description

A cluster of four suspended copper and brass wire sculptures. They are slightly different lengths ranging from the height of a coffee table to a standing lamp, hung close to each other at slightly different heights. The thin wire is delicately looped creating an appearance of wire mesh. Each sculpture consists of a vertical series of slightly irregular shaped round lobes connected to each other by a long narrow tube of the same material. Three of the lobes have additional smaller spheres suspended inside them. Three are made from grey brass wire and the smallest one is made of a copper wire that appears light gold in color. Three of the lobes have additional mesh lobes suspended inside them.