Swimming in Air
Ruth Asawa:
(The Patron Saint of San Francisco Arts)
Retrospective
SFMOMA
Ongoing – September 2
Art. It’s tricky. In the right hands, art can be made from Coke bottles. (Ask Andy Warhol.) Or a fur-covered teacup. (Meret Oppenheim’s Object). HA Schult’s Trash People is self-explanatory. The best known example of unusual material is probably Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal. The most recent example? Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian – a duct taped banana.
What does it all mean? Well, I’m not a member of The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, or a famous art critic/art historian. To me, it means that “Art” – true art, with a capital A – does not depend on the material used. Art can be in any medium, because it’s the soul of the artist that matters. The artist can take any material and turns it into Art.
Personally, I’ve used some of my cat’s fur balls in my ceramic work. In addition to having the soul of an artist, turns out you also need talent to make that stuff look good. 😳
The talent and the soul certainly came together in the sculptural works of Ruth Asawa.
Unraveling Ruth Asawa
Five years in the making, this first posthumous retrospective presents the full range of Ruth Asawa’s work and its inspirations over six decades of her career. As an artist, Asawa forged a groundbreaking practice through her ceaseless exploration of materials and forms. As an educator and civic leader, Asawa’s impact on San Francisco can still be felt today.
Asawa’s work has previously been displayed in SFMOMA’s galleries, including the important group exhibition Four Artist-Craftsmen (actually all women) in 1954, and her mid-career survey in 1973. 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.
This Retrospective is the first opportunity to fully appreciate the breadth of her work. Asawa suffered from low visibility in the broader art world during much of her lifetime. She was rejected all four times that she applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. As the distinction between art and craft – based on critical snobbery over which materials are used – has dissolved, and artists long overlooked because of their race, gender and/or sexuality are being reappraised, Asawa’s looped-wire forms have been widely acclaimed for transforming a utilitarian material and innovating techniques that added buoyancy and transparency in sculpture. The overall effect of these sculptures has been described a “swimming in air.”
Untitled (S.449, Hanging Three Lobed Form with Stripes and Two Interior Spheres) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Notice that the shadow formed by the work is a significant feature of the work.
Today, Asawa is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. For the past several decades, Asawa has become widely recognized as a prominent and influential figure in the art world, particularly for her innovative wire sculptures. Her work has gained significant appreciation in recent years, with major exhibitions, publications, and posthumous honors solidifying her reputation. (Those who toil unrecognized in the garden of art can take heart from Asawa’s reappraisal.)
Her iconic works now can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and MoMA in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the de Young Museum, Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA in The City, along with many other institutions. She even had a Google Doodle depicting her work, so clearly she had arrived.
In 2020, Christie’s sold her 1953–54 sculpture Untitled (S.401, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Continuous Interlocking Form, with Spheres Within Two Lobes) for $5.38 million. The U.S. Postal Service honored her work by producing a series of ten stamps that commemorate her well-known biomorphic sculptures.
In 2022, her art was included in the 59th Venice Biennale. That same year, Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe, the first international museum exhibition of her work, travelled to Modern Art Oxford and Stavanger Museum in Norway.
At SFMOMA
Asawa’s influence is so vast, and her artistic output so varied, that it takes 12 galleries at SFMOMA to honor that legacy. Ruth Asawa covers six decades of artmaking, with over 300 works on the museum’s fourth floor.
Prepare yourself to marvel at the breadth and depth of Asawa’s creative practice. You’ll find many of her signature suspended looped- and tied-wire sculptures. You’ll discover some of her lesser-known works, including a selection of her sculptural “miniatures” – the smallest measuring just over one inch in diameter. Enjoy her vibrant drawings and paintings, her clay masks, paperfolds, and her cast bronze sculptures. These works give insight into Asawa’s relentlessly experimental vision.
Interspersed with archival materials, including touching photographs of Asawa at work and at home made 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.
L to R: Tied- and Looped- Sculptures; Asawa and her Paperfolding Technique Center: (Exploratorium) Right: (SF Arts Education Project she co-founded)
Photos of Asawa by friend Imogen Cunningham
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.
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. Some variations were wall-mounted, while others were hung or placed on tabletops or on the floor.
Her 1965 residency at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles gave her time and space to explore a new medium. Working with a team of master printers, she create more than fifty highly experimental, often vibrantly colored prints with subjects ranging from portraits, pigeons, and plane trees like Dancers to many, many florals, including Poppy.
She never stopped trying new materials, incorporating stained glass to create a chromatic effect within one of her hanging tied-wire forms. She created a series of panels from concrete and glass detailing the history of San Francisco. These panels were initially molded out of play-doh. Indeed, one of Asawa’s sons that assisted her said: “I never knew how intricate and beautiful the Golden Gate Bridge was until I had to mold it out of play-doh.
Glass fiber reinforced concrete panels; Yesterday and Today, in place at Parc55
In her later years, a serious bout with lupus compromised her dexterity. An unstoppable artist, she re-focused on drawing and painting. Her 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.
L to R: Untitled [Bouquet from Anna Albers]; Valentine Bouquet from Adam [son]
Take a Hike
When you’ve soaked up all you can see inside the museum, get out your walking shoes and tour her 15 permanent, outdoor sculptures that grace San Francisco. Make a game of it and find her multiple sculptures and artworks in the East Bay from Santa Rosa to Palo Alto.
Click here for an interactive map of Asawa’s public art sculptures.
L to R: Aurora at Embarcadero; Origami Fountains in Japantown; at the Hilton
Discover Her Deep Connection to San Francisco
When I say “San Francisco Visual Artist,” who comes to mind? Apexer, Robert Arneson, Gilbert Baker, Joan Brown, Cathy Cade, Binh Danh, Roy De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, Mildred Howard, Dorothea Lange, Hung Liu, Yolanda López, Jeremy Novy, Ramekon O’Arwisters – and so many more have left their big hearts and indelible marks on The Bay.
However, only one is known as the Parton Saint of San Francisco Arts… Of course, I’m speaking of Ruth Asawa.
Asawa was born and raised on a farm in Southern California until she was 16, when she imprisoned with her family in the Japanese-American Incarceration Camps. At her first Camp, where she slept in a horse stall at the Santa Anita Raceway, she took drawing classes from three Walt Disney animators who were also detained there.
Asawa and her family (minus her father, who was in a different camp) were transferred to Arkansas, she continued art classes, finished high school and sketched portraits of her peers for their student yearbooks. Later, through a Quaker organization, she received a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College, where she hoped to be trained as an art teacher. In August 1943, she was issued an identification card by the War Relocation Authority that permitted her to travel to Milwaukee. Her high school English teacher from the Arkansas Camp, Mrs. Beasley, drove her to the train station. She told Asawa, “This is a terrible thing my government has done to your people. Don’t look back on your life here. You must go on.”
For many Japanese-Americans the upheaval of losing everything, including their freedom, caused irreparable harm. In 1994, when she was 68 years old, Asawa reflected on her experience:
“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.”
Asawa with granddaughter in front of her sculpture Japanese-American Internment [sic] Memorial in San Jose
However, matters did not improve considerably in Wisconsin, as she faced racism and xenophobia there. The college declined to assign her a student teaching position, citing concerns about her safety because of her race, so she was unable to graduate. Changing course, Asawa followed friends to the unaccredited, experimental Black Mountain College, the highly influential, interdisciplinary art and liberal arts school.
Her time at Black Mountain College was transformative. There, she met her future husband, Albert Lanier, an architect. She also met and became lifelong friends with the visionary architect, Buckminster Fuller. In fact, Fuller designed her wedding ring, which is on view in the exhibition.
At Black Mountain, she thrived in its multi-disciplinary approach and 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 Toluca, Mexico, where she learned from local artisans to weave baskets by looping wire. Back on campus, she began using the hand-looping technique that, endlessly iterated upon and expanded, would become the foundation of her signature wire sculptures.
She returned to California after a seven year sojourn. It was 1949 and Asawa was determined to marry Lanier, who was white. Both of their families disapproval of their interracial union. Miscegenation laws prevented them from marrying in the US, outside of California and Washington.
Asawa and Lanier, and their eventual six children, spent more than 60 years in The City (mostly in Noe Valley). Tireless, she didn’t just contribute fountains, sculptures and landscape design to San Francisco; she helped create lasting institutions dedicated to arts education. Among those:
The public arts high school, now renamed Ruth Asawa San Francisco School for the Arts;
The San Francisco Arts Education Project, offering hands-on arts instruction by working artists, and
The creative reuse center SCRAP, The City’s treasure trove of affordable art materials.
Andrea at Ghirardelli Square. The woman has a baby at her breast, while her outstretched right arm holds a lily pad in the form of a paint palette in her hand.
Special Events
Nature’s Knowledge with Garden for the Environment
On alternate Thursdays during the exhibition, join educators from Garden for the Environment as they share the connections between gardening, urban spaces, and the natural world.
Asawa’s garden was a space of creativity, collaboration, and care – a reflection of the many roles she embraced throughout her life. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective features an outdoor garden, inviting visitors to reflect on how Asawa’s attentiveness to nature is woven into her work. In each session, Garden for the Environment will impart its decades of expertise through engaging pop-up experiences, from interactive skill-sharing sessions to observational drawing activities.
Create and Connect
On May 1, the FREE First Thursday at SFMOMA, and inspired by Asawa’s dedication to using art as a means of collaboration and community building, take part in one of Asawa’s signature hands-on art-making activities and experience a performance honoring her leadership in the arts.
Led by SCRAP and Aiko Cuneo (Asawa’s daughter), the workshop reimagines milk cartons as intricate geometric forms, with each participant contributing to and expanding upon one another’s work. Asawa first explored this activity in her impactful arts education initiatives at the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in the early 1970s (now known as SF Arts Education Project). Later, she expanded on it during her residency at the Exploratorium in 1974.
The evening also features a special performance by Nobuko Miyamoto, offered in tribute to Asawa. A pioneering Japanese-American songwriter, dancer, and activist, Miyamoto experienced forced removal during World War II. Her six-decade career has been defined by her commitment to using art as a tool for community building, change, and protest. This special performance is crafted as an offering to Asawa and will invite the audience to come together in a shared experience and reflection.
