Ruth Asawa in her exhibition Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), 1973. Photo © Laurence Cuneo
Five years in the making, this international show, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 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, including drawing, printmaking, paper-folding, and the many public sculptures still on view across the Bay Area.
The retrospective will span the six decades of Asawa’s ambitious career, presenting a range of her work across mediums. Artworks will be accompanied by a rich array of archival materials—photographs, documents, and ephemera—that illuminate her public commissions, art advocacy, and meaningful, lasting relationships with members of her community. The exhibition will follow a loose chronological arc, interwoven with thematic sections elaborating on the artist’s inspirations and methods.
“People will be really astonished to see what else she did. She was somebody who was relentlessly creative. Everything she did, she did in her own way.” — SFMOMA chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop
Installation view of Drawings and Sculptures by Ruth Asawa at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA, 1960. Photo by Paul Hassel. Artwork © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner.
“She lived with the work that she was making — and that of others who were important to her, by friends and mentors like Josef Albers. We’re planning a gallery that really communicate this seamlessness between living and art making, life and art, and between the home and studio.” —Cara Manes, MoMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture
Read more about the retrospective at artnet >
“Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” will be on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, April 4–September 2, 2025; the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, New York, October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, March 20–September 13, 2026; and Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled, (S.046a-d, Hanging Group of Four, Two-Lobed Forms), 1961. Collection of Diana Nelson and John Atwater, promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo by Laurence Cuneo.