Five years in the making, this international retrospective, organized by SFMOMA and New York's MOMA, will feature over 300 works of art, featuring the intricate looped-wire hanging sculptures for which Asawa is best known. The exhibition will also showcase her works in a wide range of other media.
The National Medal of Arts is the US government’s highest award given to artists for their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the US.
This graphic biography by Sam Nakahira, developed with Asawa’s youngest daughter, Addie Lanier, chronicles the genesis of Asawa as an artist.
Read a statement from The Estate of Ruth Asawa on the Osaka Way Renovation Project in San Francisco's Japantown.
Co-organized by the Whitney Museum and the Menil Collection, Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to examine Ruth Asawa’s work through the lens of her lifelong drawing practice.
From the mid-1960s through 2000, Asawa created hundreds of individual face masks out of clay. With the Cantor's Asian American Art Initiative, this wall of 233 masks becomes a permanent part of their collection.
Titled The Milk Of Dreams, after a Leonora Carrington book, The 59th Biennale Arte opens in Venice, featuring more than 200 artists from 58 countries. Asawa's work is featured in a series of time capsules, which "establish dialogues and rhymes across generations."
The California Hall of Fame was established to honor legendary people who embody California’s innovative spirit and have made their mark on history. This years inductees also include Jerry Garcia, Larry Itliong, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, and Ritchie Valens. Watch induction video.
With this stamp, the U.S. Postal Service honors pioneering Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). Showcasing Asawa’s wire sculptures, the pane includes 20 stamps, with two each of 10 designs, featuring photographs by Dan Bradica and Laurence Cuneo.
"In a culture of acknowledging those who were previously overlooked, when artists and their earliest champions are finally getting their dues, there is a satisfaction in witnessing the record be corrected."
"Author Marilyn Chase, a San Francisco journalist and teacher, connects the barbed wire and dispossession of Asawa’s early life to the artist’s transformative approach to spooled metal, and intimately conveys the teeming creative life inside her home studio as it filled with six children."
"The year's most beautiful exhibition” says Sebastian Smee of the Washington Post. “You don’t expect sculpture to function as a visual correlative to swimming in air. Asawa found a way and, in so doing, found her voice.”
The simplest objects can turn into art when you draw from life, nature, and personal passion. A Life Made By Hand: The Story Of Ruth Asawa is a children's book, for ages 5-8, written and illustrated by Andrea D'Aquino.
Top Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust