California Modernist Women - Groundbreaking Creativity
2022-06-16 08:00 - 2023-04-30 17:00 UTC | SFO Museum, San Francisco Airport, San Francisco, CA, 94128, United States
California played a central role in the formation of a modern American aesthetic during the mid-twentieth century. Decorative arts and design reflected exciting new technologies and forms of expression. As modernist artists and designers looked beyond traditional methods and towards the future, some also found inspiration in the handmade qualities of crafts. Many of the Golden State’s most innovative artists and designers were women who faced great adversity due to prevailing gender inequality. The most determined women pushed forward, driven by enthusiasm, strength, and creativity.
To protect themselves from potential disadvantage, some women artists signed only their first initial and last name to their artworks. In defiance, San Francisco artist Doris Hodgson Bothwell (1902–2000) changed her legal first name to Dorr, a nickname from childhood that she preferred. Ray Eames (1912–88) was an artist and designer who did not initially receive full recognition for her work. Aligned with mid-century conventions, her husband Charles Eames (1907–78) was attributed as the designer for all Eames Office products, although the dynamic couple designed together with the rest of their team.
Many artists and designers faced other complex challenges. During the Second World War, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) escaped extended incarceration in a Japanese American internment camp with a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). After training for three years to become an art teacher, she was denied the necessary internship for graduation due to postwar racism. Asawa became a renowned artist and advocate for art education, and in 1982, she helped establish a public arts high school—renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.
California Modernist Women: Groundbreaking Creativity introduces these and other artists who worked in California and the San Francisco Bay Area. Ruth Asawa and Ray Eames, along with jeweler Margaret De Patta (1903–64) and potters Edith Heath (1911–2005) and Marguerite Wildenhain (1896–1985), are internationally acclaimed, and appreciation for their work continues to grow. Other outstanding artists including Dorr Bothwell, sculptors Freda Koblick (1920–2011) and Mary Fuller McChesney (1922–2022), potter Eileen Reynolds Curtis (1915–77), artist and designer Zahara Schatz (1916–99), and multidisciplinary artists Esther (1896–1992), Helen (1898–1985), and Margaret Bruton (1894–1983), enjoyed success in their time, yet were overlooked in subsequent years.

Harvey Milk Terminal 1

Departures Level 2, Gallery 1E
Jun 16, 2022 – Apr 30, 2023

Photo © 2022 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society, NY. Courtesy David Zwirner

The Faces Of Ruth Asawa
2022-07-06 11:00 - 2026-07-06 17:00 | Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States
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.
The Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) transforms Stanford into the leading academic and curatorial center for Asian American art. Alexander and Marci Kwon, assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History, serve as AAAI co-directors. As part of the initiative, the Cantor works to build the preeminent collection of Asian American art at a university art museum.
The Cantor acquired Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks) in 2020. On July 6, 2022, they go on long-term view at the museum, marking the first time this work has been shown in its entirety at any museum or public institution. The focused exhibition, The Faces of Ruth Asawa, curated by Alexander, features the masks and three vessels by Asawa’s son Paul Lanier. These special vessels were created with clay mixed with the ashes of Asawa, her husband Albert, and their late son, Adam. Upon Asawa’s death—per her request—Lanier took this material and threw a set of vessels, one for each remaining sibling. The three included in The Faces of Ruth Asawa were borrowed from the family. Their inclusion in the exhibition further demonstrates Asawa’s deeply intimate connection to clay.
Hear from Asawa’s family and friends, including mask subjects, about her process making the masks >
The museum is open Wed – Sun, free with reservations. Reserve here >
End date is open-ended.

Generation: The Roots of Making in the Asawa-Lanier Family
2023-01-12 10:00 - 2023-03-31 17:00 | Ruth’s Table, 3160 21st Street, San Francisco, 94110, United States
Top image: Aiko Lanier Cuneo, Dancing Dots and Triangles, 2021.
Ruth’s Table is pleased to present Generation: The Roots of Making in the Asawa-Lanier Family, a group exhibition that brings together four generations from a San Francisco family of makers. Inspired by our namesake, world-renowned artist Ruth Asawa, the exhibition serves as an opportunity to honor Asawa’s life-long commitment to community-based art education and activism in the arts.
The word generation can have several meanings. A generation is a group of people born and living at the same time. It can also mean creating or making. Timed to coincide with Asawa’s birthday month, Generation is a tribute and a testament that Asawa’s values live on through generations – in the Asawa-Lanier family, in communities and organizations, like Ruth’s Table – that share her unwavering belief that creative engagement is essential and can impact the lives of people of all ages.
The exhibition brings together works in wire and lithography by Ruth Asawa; paintings, drawings, and birthday envelopes by Albert Lanier; paintings and a clay platter by Paul Lanier; textile, collage, and painting by Aiko Lanier Cuneo; origami portraits, paintings, and paper construction by Lilli Lanier; and paintings by Lucia Ruth Soriano. All of these artists have worked with one another on public commissions, as teaching artists in schools, and collaborated on pieces in this show.
The work exhibited in Generation spans 57 years from 1965 to 2022. Motifs rooted in interwoven patterns of line, repetition, and dynamic interactions between geometric shapes, color, and forms, appear in all artists’ works creating inherent conversation and visual connections carried through varying media. Together, they form a story of four generations of a family that is joined not only in relationship, but by the curiosity and love of materials, color, and pattern.
Lilli Lanier, Origami Ruth Asawa, 2022. Origami paper. 50” x 40”.
ROOTS OF RUTH’S TABLE
Established in 2009, Ruth’s Table is named after an actual table, constructed by Ruth Asawa’s husband architect Albert Lanier, at which Asawa created her own art and then donated to the organization, thus officially launching the start of the program. Generation: The Roots of Making in the Asawa-Lanier Family exhibition also pays homage to the roots of Ruth’s Table which was profoundly shaped by Asawa’s values and continues to use the power of art to build a more connected, resilient, and inclusive community.
Hours:
Tuesday- Friday
10am-5pm
Select Saturdays
or by appointment

Women and Abstraction: 1741-Now
2023-01-28 10:00 - 2023-07-30 17:00 | Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy 3 Chapel Avenue, Andover, MA, 01810, United States
Women and Abstraction: 1741-Now offers a nuanced and expansive history of the development of abstraction in America, going beyond the traditional art historical narrative of this movement. The exhibition looks at how women from the 18th century to the present day have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction—color, line, shape, contrast, pattern, and texture—working across a wide variety of media, including painting, textiles, sculpture, photography, drawing, and ceramics.
Drawn almost exclusively from the Addison’s permanent collection, the exhibition features pieces ranging from colonial bed rugs and contemporary textile works by Sheila Hicks, to 19th-century Ojibwe beaded bandolier bags and a 2014 sculpture by Lynda Benglis, combining recognizable masterworks by leading abstractionists with work by historically overlooked women artists and makers, as well as objects that have historically been denied the status of fine art. Featured are pieces by Bernice Abbott, Candida Alvarez, Ruth Asawa, Margaret Bourke-White, Petah Coyne, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellen Gallagher, Libbie Mark, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Betty Parsons, Rosamond Purcell, Deborah Remington, Anne Ryan, Hedda Sterne, Toshiko Takaezu, Alma Thomas, Dominique Toya, Penelope Umbrico, and others.
Allison Kemmerer, the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art said, “Women and Abstraction is a quintessential expression of the Addison’s mission: to offer new insights on American art while expanding the art historical canon. Eschewing traditional chronology, hierarchies of medium, and the restrictive definitions of art movements, it encourages us to rethink our preconceived ideas and opens new ways of seeing the art of this country.”
Gordon Wilkins, the Addison’s Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art and curator of Women and Abstraction noted, “The important work done over the past decades to illuminate the contributions of historically marginalized women has largely concentrated on white painters associated with the postwar, 20th-century New York school’s abstract expressionism. While Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and others among their contemporaries have rightfully been ensconced in the pantheon of great American abstract artists, the works of many more women—from all periods— remain unexamined by scholars and museums alike. This exhibition proposes a different way of looking at abstraction in American art, inviting visitors to draw aesthetic connections across seemingly disparate objects and complicating ingrained notions of what abstraction is and is not.”
Hours:
Tuesday through Saturday: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Sunday: 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Closed on Mondays, national holidays, December 24, and during the month of August.
Admission to all exhibitions is free.
