SFMOMA and MoMA Announce Major Ruth Asawa Retrospective

Ruth Asawa 1926-2013, United States Follow +

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) yesterday announced a major exhibition of works by Ruth Asawa (1926–2013).

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective will debut at SFMOMA from 4 April to 2 September 2025 before travelling to MoMA from 19 October 2025 to 7 February 2026. It will venture on to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from 20 March–13 September 2026 and conclude its run at Fondation Beyeler from 18 October 2026 to 24 January 2027.

’Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is deeply aligned with SFMOMA’s vision to be both local and global—presenting Bay Area artists with profound significance that also have the potential to be highly impactful and relevant on an international scale,’ said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA.

Spanning six decades of Asawa’s career, the exhibition will include some 300 objects spanning mediums including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings, and works on paper.

The exhibition is organised by Janet Bishop, Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, at MoMA.

‘What’s exceptional about Asawa’s practice is the multiplicity of her artistic pursuits and the marvellous ability to turn the simplest things into subjects of lifelong creative contemplation,’ Manes said.

‘The exhibition aims to offer multiple points of entry into her work, reflecting what Asawa described as the “total act” of artmaking,’ she said.

Asawa was born in Norwalk, California, and raised on a farm. As a teenager during World War II, she and her family were incarcerated in war relocation camps. While interned, she practised drawing with Japanese-American Disney animators.

After the war, she enrolled in Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied under painter Josef Albers and architect Buckminster Fuller, among others. In 1947, she travelled to Mexico, where she took lessons with local weavers that helped inspire the metal sculptures for which she is best known.

Largely overlooked during her lifetime, Asawa has received growing attention in recent years. David Zwirner announced representation of her estate in 2017 and the Whitney Museum of American Art held an exhibition of her drawings titled Through Line from 16 September 2023–15 January 2024.

Writing about the exhibition for Ocula, Martin Gelin said, ‘Asawa often spoke of the connection between agriculture and craft and Albers’ lessons about learning to love the process itself. In her meticulous drawings and graphic works, you can see and feel the labour going into each line.’ —[O]

Main image: Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art (1973). © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society, New York. Courtesy David Zwirner. Photo: Laurence Cuneo.