At Home With Ruth Asawa At The San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) retrospective checks all the boxes you’d expect from one of the nation’s leading museums producing a blockbuster exhibition devoted to one of modern art’s greatest figures.

Bulging at the seams, more than 300 artworks spanning a six-decade career engage the full range of materials and techniques that Asawa employed including her signature looped-wire sculptures. In addition, drawings, prints, paintings, design objects and archival material from U.S.-based public and private collections offer an in-depth look at her expansive output and its inspirations.

“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” goes next level, however, when it does more than introduce visitors to Asawa and her artwork by inviting them into the artist’s home.

In 1949, Asawa moved from North Carolina to San Francisco, the city she would call home for the rest of her life. That year, she exhibited at SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) for the first time. During her lifetime, she participated in some 30 exhibitions at the museum, most notably a mid-career survey in 1973.

SFMOMA’s decades long relationship with and close proximity to Asawa has allowed the museum to construct a gallery recreating her giant, cathedral like wood-paneled den with sculptures hanging from ceiling and items collected from artist friends on shelves. Asawa, her husband Albert Lanier, and their six children moved into an Arts and Crafts style home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood in 1961. This would be the hub of her creative and family life until her passing in 2013.

“I’ve always had my studio in the house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me—or a peanut butter sandwich,” Asawa said.

Artists can produce thousands of pieces over long careers and remain elusive. That statement from Asawa is all anyone would ever need to know about who she was, what she was all about.

The installation reunites a grouping of wire sculptures of various forms and sizes that Asawa is known to have hung from the rafters in her living room, as well as a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and examples of her material experiments in clay, copper, electroplating, and bronze. Highlights of the space are Asawa’s original hand carved redwood doors from the house and works she displayed by other artists, including Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, Peggy Tolk-Watkins, and Marguerite Wildenhain.

“Though she had a studio on the lower level of the home, she preferred working on the main floor, in the living room or kitchen amidst the coming and goings of family and friends,” exhibition co-curator Janet Bishop told Forbes.com. “It was a highly creative environment where she pursued independent work such as her suspended wire sculptures and engaged in side-by-side activities like origami or baker’s clay sculpting. Hundreds of visitors to her home had their faces cast for one of her ongoing artistic projects and schoolchildren came to her garden to learn about the growth of flowers and vegetables.”

SFMOMA recreates Asawa’s garden in the exhibition as well, another source of endless inspiration and comfort to her.

“At the half-way point of (the exhibition), visitors encounter a terrace, which is typically used for outdoor sculpture. To coincide with the exhibition, we invited David Brenner and Habitat Horticulture—the team that built SFMOMA’s living wall in 2016—to create an Asawa-inspired garden,” Bishop explained. “Visitors can step outside, take in the fresh air, smell the lilacs, and admire a variety of flowering plants that provided enduring inspiration to Asawa.”

The ongoing inspiration of the artist’s garden is revealed in a final gallery featuring a stunning array of Asawa’s late drawings of plants, bouquets and flowers produced during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Imprisoned As Japanese American

Ruth Asawa was born in Norwalk, CA, in 1926, the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant farmers. She was raised on a farm. Her childhood coincided with a shameful chapter from American history.

In 1942, the teenager–a U.S. citizen–and her family were sent to concentration camps along with tens of thousands of other Americans of Japanese descent in the wake of Executive Order 9066. The bombing of Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan resulted in a racist, anti-Japanese panic across the country. On the West Coast, over 100,000 U.S. citizens and Japanese immigrants were rounded up and sent to the camps without having been accused of any crime or traitorous behavior, without any due process, with mere hours to prepare for their indeterminate imprisonment, and allowed to take only what they could carry.

Asawa’s father was arrested by the FBI and sent to New Mexico. No charges. No attorney. No courtroom or trial. The family wouldn’t see him for almost two years.

The artist was sent with her mother and five siblings to the Santa Anita horse racing track in Arcadia, CA where they lived for five months in two horse stalls.

“The stench was horrible,” Asawa said. “The smell of horse dung never left the place the entire time we were there.”

Human beings treated like animals. Law abiding U.S. citizens. Not even accused of a crime, let alone having committed one. Imprisoned for suspicion. And this was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, perhaps the most progressive U.S. president ever.

It happened before, it’s happening again.

Asawa was one among an astounding number of prominent artists and future artists imprisoned.

Undeterred, after the war, she enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, NC. She thrived there from 1946 to 1949 with the encouragement of teachers including Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

A 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico proved career-altering. It was there where she learned the looped-wire technique for basketry from local artisans that would prove fundamental to her sculptural practice of the following decade and beyond.

“The material, form, and technique fascinated her,” Bishop said. “She continued making porous, looped baskets when she got back to school and in 1949, she closed up the form for the first time and suspended it from above—a sculptural innovation that led to her extraordinary body of looped-wire sculptures.”

The art world instantly went wild.

“From very early in her career, Asawa’s professors, gallerists, museum directors and curators recognized the brilliance in Asawa’s work—elegant, formally and materially inventive abstractions that are highly satisfying to look at,” Bishop continued. “Some of her looped-wire sculptures entered museum collections in the 1950s, close to the time they were first made.”

The instantly recognizable looped-wire sculptures remain what Asawa is best known for.

Ruth Asawa’s San Francisco

Asawa did more than live, work, and raise a family in San Francisco, she fully immersed herself into the city’s arts community. She loved it.

“Asawa found San Francisco big enough to be interesting, and yet also small enough where she felt like she could cultivate an intimate community and make a difference,” Bishop explained. “Asawa led by example, was highly participatory, and inherently collaborative. She was a tremendous arts advocate. She created arts programs in public schools, served on the San Francisco Arts Commission, and worked tirelessly to establish the city’s first public arts high school, now named the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.”

Again, all anyone should ever need to know to understand what kind of person the artist was.

Throughout the retrospective, Asawa’s arts advocacy and public sculptures across San Francisco from the 1960s forward are highlighted. Video, photographs, maquettes, and archival materials illuminate Asawa’s fountains at Ghirardelli Square (Andrea, 1968); Union Square (San Francisco Fountain, 1973); and Bayside Plaza, Embarcadero (Aurora, 1986), as well as projects connected to Japanese American incarceration in San Jose (Japanese American Internment Memorial, 1990–94) and at San Francisco State University (Garden of Remembrance, 2000-02).

“Asawa led a very purposeful life,” Bishop said. “She believed that every minute that we are privileged enough to be on this earth, we should be doing something. She made time for the things that mattered to her, seamlessly integrating a very productive studio practice with family, community, and arts advocacy.”

“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” the artist’s first major national and international museum retrospective, can be seen at SFMOMA through September 2, 2025, then The Museum of Modern Art, New York (October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (March 20–September 13, 2026); and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027), coinciding with what would have been Asawa’s 100th birthday on January 24, 2026.

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