Ruth Asawa

The Faces Of Ruth Asawa
2022-07-06 11:00 - 2028-07-06 17:00 UTC | 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.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
2026-03-19 10:00 - 2026-09-13 19:00 | Guggenheim Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Bilbo, Bizkaia, 48009, Spain
Ruth Asawa was one of the most uniquely gifted and productive artists to emerge in the postwar era in the United States. Raised on a farm in Southern California, the teenage Asawa and her family were detained in Japanese American incarceration camps in 1942. By 1946, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. She thrived in the school’s intense and creative atmosphere, where the encouragement of her teachers, including Josef Albers, pushed her to explore the possibilities of ordinary materials, including stamps, leaves, paper, and eventually wire.
Among her early innovations are her suspended looped-wire sculptures: sinewy, sensuous, and transparent forms that later explore repetition, shape, shadows, and space. In 1949, Asawa moved to San Francisco, and broadened her range of three-dimensional work with complex tied-wire sculptures that later suggest organic structures such as flowers, roots, trees, and nervous systems, as well as electroplated and cast bronze works, paintings, prints, and drawings. By the late 1960s, Asawa was well-known in the San Francisco Bay Area for her public art commissions, advocacy for arts education, and her civic leadership. While the appreciation of Asawa’s work has grown exponentially in the last decade, this retrospective is the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s exquisite, varied, and groundbreaking practice.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
The exhibition is co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, in collaboration with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Hours:
TUESDAY–SUNDAY
10 am to 7 pm.
Open on Mondays March 25 and April 1. June 19 to September 22: open every day, from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm.
General Admission €15
Over 65 €7.50
Students 18-25 €7.50
Children and youths under 18 Free
International exhibition tour supported by The Henry Luce Foundation
Photo: Artist Ruth Asawa making wire sculptures, California, United States, November 1954;
artwork: © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., Courtesy David Zwirner;
image: Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
© Ruth Asawa, Bilbao 2026
