SFMOMA’s Ruth Asawa Retrospective Honors the Patron Saint of San Francisco Arts

Is there any artist as locally beloved as Ruth Asawa? For all of Wayne Thiebaud’s vertiginous streets and Joan Brown’s vibrant renderings of city life, it’s Asawa we most hope embodies the spirit of San Francisco.

That’s because the artist, who moved here in 1949 and died here in 2013, didn’t just contribute fountains, sculptures and landscape design to the city’s physical shape; she helped create lasting institutions dedicated to arts education. Among those are our public arts high school, now named for her; 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.

Asawa’s influence is so vast, and her artistic output so varied, that it takes 12 galleries at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to honor that legacy. Ruth Asawa is the artist’s first posthumous retrospective, and it goes big, covering six decades of artmaking, with over 300 works on the museum’s fourth floor.

Arranged chronologically and thematically, the show won’t disappoint fans of Asawa’s hanging looped-wire sculptures. By my count, there are nearly 60 of those airy pieces in this show. But co-curators Janet Bishop (of SFMOMA) and Cara Manes (of MoMA, the touring exhibition’s next stop) also focus on bodies of work I was far less familiar with: early abstract paintings, branching tied-wire sculptures and intricate ink drawings of bouquets.

The exhibition begins at Black Mountain College, the storied alternative art school Asawa attended between 1946 and 1949 after she was unable to receive her teaching degree from the Milwaukee State Teachers’ College. (There was so much anti-Japanese sentiment following WWII, the college refused to place her in a Wisconsin school. “They were afraid for my life,” she later said.)

In North Carolina, she studied under the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller and alongside Susan Weil, Ray Johnson and Albert Lanier, her future husband. In the work from those years, we see Asawa using uncharacteristically bright colors, repeating gestures to create patterns and experimenting with biomorphic forms.

Tucked into a corner is a sweet exchange between Lanier and Asawa: a postmarked envelope addressed to her at “B.M.C.” and the 1948 painting she made using the stamp colors. Asawa joined Lanier in San Francisco in 1949; they were married less than a year after California repealed its laws banning interracial unions.

Between 1950 and 1959, Asawa had six children. Her work appeared in what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and on the pages of Vogue. She secured a patent, was represented by a New York gallery and sold her first piece to a museum (the Oakland Museum of California), among other accomplishments. She didn’t really slow down from there.

There were other directions Asawa’s career could have gone. Early on, she and Lanier made wallpaper and textile designs. A San Francisco interior design company offered Asawa a contract to mass-produce looped-wire baskets and waste bins. But by 1954 she had fully committed to fine art.

Her looped-wire forms, made by hand through a knitting-like process without tools or hooks, grew increasingly complex. They curve in on themselves, blending different types of metal and suspending forms within forms organically, almost magically. The installation at SFMOMA is stellar, with shadows given almost as much space as the art.

In a series of works on mat board, she approximated the effect of her looped-wire sculptures with cut-outs of pre-printed adhesive film. The moiré patterns that result in these overlaps capture the difficulty of correctly resolving the interior and exterior of Asawa’s forms.

Even as she developed new ways of making sculptural forms, Asawa was using the humblest of materials in tried-and-true ways. Some of my favorite pieces in the show are stamped ink on paper, repeated shapes of cut apples, potatoes and even a bike pedal. To Asawa, art could be informed by — and physically made from — just about anything in everyday life: fruits and vegetables, flowers, a sleeping child, bentwood cane chairs, a shingled house.

At the exhibition’s center, a large gallery lined with warm wood panels cozily nods to Asawa’s Noe Valley living room, which was filled with her own art, friends’ work and the comings and goings of her family of eight. It’s a nexus, a hub. In 1962, whether knowingly or not, she began to illustrate that concept through tied-wire sculptures.

While her looped-wire forms are circular and self-contained, these pieces are open-ended bursts of ever-diminishing branches of wire. Think tumbleweed, root structure, fractal, snowflake under a microscope. The spiky sculptures impressively range in size, some of their tips dotted with glimmering drops of resin. When Asawa electroplated these pieces, the chemicals made the metal grow even fuzzier.

The exhibition’s final galleries are given over to a staggering number of works on paper, most of them delicate drawings of flowers, documentation of bouquets given to Asawa by friends and family. Her elegant, exacting lines trace petals, stems and leaves, making permanent these ephemeral, soon-to-be-wilted arrangements.

It’s a tendency present in much of her work: taking impermanent things like baker’s clay and paper folds, and turning them into solid, lasting bronzes. Starting off small, with at-hand materials, children and volunteers could join in Asawa’s artmaking. Her 1973 Union Square fountain is the handiwork of more than 250 San Francisco residents, aged three to 88.

Public art, printmaking, arts education, ceramics, giant doors — I’ve glossed over so much of the retrospective because there’s simply so much in it. One gets the sense that Asawa couldn’t not make art.

In pictures of her working with school groups in the early days of the Alvarado School Arts Workshop (now SFArtsED), she wears a grey sweatshirt covered in paint with a sizable hole below the neckline. In another revealing image, an undated photocopy of Asawa’s hand, her injured pointer finger is wrapped in gauze.

This is the Ruth Asawa I like to picture: the busy, prolific patron saint of San Francisco arts. This is what an experiment-driven, rigorous, collaborative and deeply generous art practice looks like — and what Ruth Asawa captures, in room after room, so well.

‘Ruth Asawa: Retrospective’ in on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art April 5–Sept 2, 2025.