Ruth Asawa

Ink, Paper, Stone: Six Women Artists and the Language of Lithography
2022-10-14 12:00 - 2023-02-13 17:00 UTC | Norton Simon Museum
Ink, Paper, Stone: Six Women Artists and the Language of Lithography examines the prints of six critically acclaimed artists who visited Los Angeles in the 1960s to explore the art of lithography: Ruth Asawa, Gego, Eleanore Mikus, Louise Nevelson, Irene Siegel and Hedda Sterne. Each woman received a two-month fellowship at the famed Tamarind Lithography Workshop, founded by the visionary printmaker June Wayne in 1960. With its mission to train master printers and pair them with visiting artists, Tamarind was a nexus for the revival of the medium in America. Though each of the artists in this exhibition had already established her reputation in other media by the time of her visit—and only two had made lithographs before—they all found that lithography offered fascinating, new possibilities for exploring their aesthetic interests.
At Tamarind, Gego, Mikus and Nevelson engineered unique approaches to geometric abstraction, kineticism and minimalism in their lithographs. Sterne and Asawa created imagery derived from literature and nature, sources that had provided them with lifelong inspiration. Irene Siegel alone composed stylized, figurative vignettes that pop with vibrant color and bold lines. In the lithography workshop, these six distinct artists shared an interest in the physical properties of their materials, including ink and paper, which they exploited to convey a sense of the artist’s own hand in the process of making an image.
Describing her folded paper drawings from this period, Eleanore Mikus advised viewers to pay close attention, for “the more you look, the more you see.” Ink, Paper, Stone explores the significance of that observation in the works of art themselves, as well as in the lives of these groundbreaking women artists, who navigated the complex and competing expectations of an art world in which female achievement was measured by a different set of standards.
The museum is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, open from 12-5 all other days except Saturday, when it’s open until 7:00.
Adults $15.00
Seniors (ages 62 and above) $12.00
Children (ages 18 and under) Free
Students with valid I.D. Free
Museum Members Free
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Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe
2022-10-01 08:00 - 2023-01-22 17:00 | Stavanger Art Museum, Henrik Ibsens gate 55, Stavanger, Norway
Citizen of the Universe takes a unique look at the visionary artist, educator and activist Ruth Asawa. The exhibition features her signature hanging sculptures in looped and tied wire, and celebrates her holistic integration of art, education and community engagement through displaying prints, drawings, letters and photographs.
Asawa called for an inclusive and revolutionary vision for art’s role in society. As a teenager she lived in an internment camp due to the forced relocation and incarceration for some 120,000 Japanese-Americans by the US government on the eve of World War II. Despite the extreme conditions she learned artistic skills from professional artists and left in the firm belief that art can be life changing and a positive force for social good.
Asawa studied at Black Mountain College from 1946-49, nurturing her philosophy of the “integration of creative labour within daily life”. Here she formed a lifelong friendship with visionary architect R. Buckminster Fuller, who once described her as one of the greatest artists he knew. As a result of her experiences at the college, Asawa recognised that people can choose to transcend race, class and nationalistic divisions.
For Asawa, living a full life meant being socially engaged, having a family, creating art with them, and fully participating in the life of her local community. Quietly charismatic, Asawa chose to identify as a “citizen of the universe”, developing a sense of higher purpose grounded in improving life through art. Foregrounding these ideas, this exhibition is an affirmation of her timely relevance as a champion of the vital role creativity plays in society.
Citizen of the Universe is the first public solo exhibition in Europe of Ruth Asawa’s work. The exhibition is organised in partnership with Modern Art Oxford where it was on display from 28 May – 21 August 2022.Curators: Emma Ridgway (Modern Art Oxford) and Vibece Salthe (Stavanger Art Museum).
Hours:
Monday Closed
Thuesday 11.00-15.00
Wednesday 11.00-15.00
Thursday 11.00-19.00
Friday 11.00-15.00
Saturday 11.00-16.00
Sunday 11.00-16.00
Ticket Prices:
Adults: 100
Children under 18 years: Free
Students: Free
Seniors: 70
Annual ticket, adult: 500
Annual ticket, seniors: 400
HALF PRICE ADMISSION every Saturday

Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe
2022-05-27 08:00 - 2022-08-20 17:00 | Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, OX1 1BP, United Kingdom
Citizen of the Universe takes a unique look at the visionary artist, educator and activist Ruth Asawa. The exhibition features her signature hanging sculptures in looped and tied wire, and celebrates her holistic integration of art, education and community engagement through displaying prints, drawings, letters and photographs.
Asawa called for an inclusive and revolutionary vision for art’s role in society. As a teenager she lived in an internment camp due to the forced relocation and incarceration for some 120,000 Japanese-Americans by the US government on the eve of World War II. Despite the extreme conditions she learned artistic skills from professional artists and left in the firm belief that art can be life changing and a positive force for social good.
Asawa studied at Black Mountain College from 1946-49, nurturing her philosophy of the “integration of creative labour within daily life”. Here she formed a lifelong friendship with visionary architect R. Buckminster Fuller, who once described her as one of the greatest artists he knew. As a result of her experiences at the college, Asawa recognised that people can choose to transcend race, class and nationalistic divisions.
For Asawa, living a full life meant being socially engaged, having a family, creating art with them, and fully participating in the life of her local community. Quietly charismatic, Asawa chose to identify as a “citizen of the universe”, developing a sense of higher purpose grounded in improving life through art. Foregrounding these ideas, this exhibition is an affirmation of her timely relevance as a champion of the vital role creativity plays in society.
Modern art Oxford is open Tues. through Sat 10:00–17:00
and Sunday 12:00–17:00

The Milk of Dreams: Biennale Arte 2022
2022-04-23 11:00 - 2022-11-27 19:00 | Arsenale, Sestiere Castello, Campo Della Tana 2169/F, Venice, +39 0415218711, 30122, Italy
The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Milk of Dreams, is open to the public from Saturday April 23 to Sunday November 27, 2022, at the Giardini and the Arsenale; it is curated by Cecilia Alemani and organised by La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Roberto Cicutto. “As the first Italian woman to hold this position, I intend to give voice to artists to create unique projects that reflect their visions and our society”, Alemani has declared.
Cecilia Alemani is a curator who has organized many exhibitions of contemporary artists. She is currently Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, the programme of public art of the urban park in New York, and is the past curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2017.
“This Exhibition is grounded in many conversations with artists held in the last few years. The questions that kept emerging from these dialogues seem to capture this moment in history when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up many other inquiries that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?
These are some of the guiding questions for this edition of the Biennale Arte, which focuses on three thematic areas in particular: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.”
“As visitors move through the Exhibition in the Central Pavilion and the Corderie, they encounter five smaller, historical sections: miniature constellations of artworks, found objects, and documents, clustered together to explore certain key themes. Conceived like time capsules, these shows within the show provide additional tools of investigation and introspection, weaving a web of references and echoes that link artworks of the past – including major museum loans and unconventional selections – to the pieces by contemporary artists in the surrounding space. This wide-ranging, transhistorical approach traces kinships and affinities between artistic methods and practices, even across generations, to create new layers of meaning and bridge present and past. What emerges is a historical narrative that is not built around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.”
“The Milk of Dreams was conceived and organised in a period of enormous instability and uncertainty, since its development coincided with the outbreak and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. La Biennale di Venezia was forced to postpone this edition by one year, an event that had only occurred during the two World Wars since 1895. So the very fact that this Exhibition can open is somewhat extraordinary: its inauguration is not exactly the symbol of a return to normal life, but rather the outcome of a collective effort that seems almost miraculous. During these endless months in front of the screen, I have pondered the question of what role the International Art Exhibition should play at this historical juncture, and the simplest, most sincere answer I could find is that the Biennale sums up all the things we have so sorely missed in the last two years: the freedom to meet people from all over the world, the possibility of travel, the joy of spending time together, the practice of difference, translation, incomprehension, and communion.
The Milk of Dreams is not an Exhibition about the pandemic, but it inevitably registers the upheavals of our era. In times like this, as the history of La Biennale di Venezia clearly shows, art and artists can help us imagine new modes of coexistence and infinite new possibilities of transformation.” –Cecilia Alemani
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Artmaking as Lifemaking: Kinji Akagawa at Tamarind
2022-04-23 10:00 - 2022-10-30 17:00 | Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
Art Making as Life Making: Kinjia Akagawa at Tamarind offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of life in a 1960s print workshop. At the age of 25, Akagawa embarked on a fellowship to train as a printer at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. While there, Akagawa collaborated with more than a dozen leading artists, including Ruth Asawa, Herbert Bayer, and Jose Luis Cuevas, printing their lithographs and creating his own editions of prints. The communal environment at Tamarind had a profound impact on his philosophies of art, in which he embraced dialogue, collaboration, and co-creation as pillars of a democratic vision of art. The exhibition features more than 40 works from the Carter’s collection of more than 2,500 Tamarind Workshop prints.
Museum Hours
SUNDAY noon–5 p.m.
MONDAY Closed
TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
THURSDAY 10 a.m.–8 p.m.
Admission is free.

Unfailingly Creative: The Unbreakable Bond between Artists Imogen Cunningham and Ruth Asawa
2022-04-03 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
In 1950, photographer Imogen Cunningham met sculptor Ruth Asawa. Despite their 43-year age difference, the two artists quickly developed an unbreakable bond. Aside from their creative friendship, the two women also refused to choose between family life and their art.
In this conversation, Meg Partridge, Cunningham’s granddaughter and director of the Imogen Cunningham Trust, joins Addie Lanier, daughter of Ruth Asawa, and Daniell Cornell, curator and author of The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air to talk about how these artists navigated art and motherhood. Moderated by Los Angeles-based author and performer Sandra Tsing Loh, the panel discusses how these artists became friends, the difficulties they faced as women artists, and the creative strategies they employed to succeed in a male-dominated art world.
This Free April 3 event is being held at the Getty Center and can be streamed on zoom. Advance tickets are required.
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Find out about the Imogen Cunningham Retrospective at the Getty Center >

Duro Olowu Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection
2022-03-18 08:00 - 2022-08-28 17:00 | Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, New York, United States
Nigerian British designer Duro Olowu guest curates the 20th installment in Cooper Hewitt’s Selects exhibition series, which invites designers, writers, and cultural figures to explore and interpret objects in the museum’s permanent collection. Olowu’s exhibition highlights the theme of pattern and repetition throughout the collection, demonstrating how designers, artists, and makers have relied on pattern to express ideas, preserve heritage, capture attention, and construct objects and environments.
Hours:
Thursday–Monday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Tuesday–Wednesday, closed.
Thanksgiving Day, closed.
Christmas Day, closed.

No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration
2022-03-16 11:00 - 2022-05-15 18:00 | Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Long Island City, NY, 11106, United States
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum presents No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration, a focused, small-scale group exhibition guest curated by Genji Amino with Christina Hiromi Hobbs.
The exhibition is organized to mark the eightieth anniversary of Executive Order 9066 (signed on February 19, 1942) which authorized the forced removal and mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II. Including a selection of works by Japanese American artists, some of whom were incarcerated and others whose lives were shaped indirectly by the widespread impact of the Executive Order, the exhibition represents an array of photographic and sculptural experiments following an event marking the height of anti-Japanese sentiment in the twentieth century.
It includes a small selection of works made by as yet unidentified Japanese Americans in the concentration camps. These works now reside in the collection of the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, and circulate as part of the traveling exhibition and remembrance project Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection. They are presented alongside work by Leo Amino (1911–1989), Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Joseph Goto (1916–1994), Hiromu Kira (1898–1991), Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979), Patrick Nagatani (1945–2017), Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926) and Toshiko Takaezu (1926–2011).
By gathering together works such as Isamu Noguchi’s haunting wood and bone Monument to Heroes (1943), Kay Sekimachi’s ethereal hanging fiber work Ogawa II (1969), and Patrick Nagatani’s 1994 photographs of the former sites of Japanese American concentration camps in Utah and Idaho, the exhibition presents a range of approaches to abstraction developed following the era of Japanese American incarceration.
The Museum is open from 11-6 on Wednesday through Sunday, and closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Drawing Without Paper
2022-03-12 10:00 - 2022-09-18 17:00 | The Met Museum, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10028, United States
In the mid-1920s, the sculptor Julio González abandoned casting and began using the techniques of forging and welding iron to create what he called “drawings in space,” a series of innovative works that challenged the perception of mass and gravity traditionally associated with the experience of sculpture.
The idea of “drawing in space” proved highly influential for a number of artists throughout the mid- to late twentieth century, especially Alexander Calder, Ruth Asawa, David Smith, and Gego. By exploring notions of transparency and weightlessness with lines and forms, they redefined how sculpture interacts with the surrounding environment. Other artists complicated the definition of drawing by experimenting with line, materiality, process, and even the outdoor landscape, including Sheila Hicks, Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Tuttle, Zarina, Ana Mendieta, Dennis Oppenheim, Liliana Porter, Oscar Muñoz and Richard Long.
Titled after a work by Gego (1912–1994) recently gifted to The Met by Lilly Scarpetta, Drawing without Paper features a select group of works that embrace an expanded notion of drawing, freeing the line into space. The installation is curated by Iria Candela, Estrellita B Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, Modern and Contemporary Art.
The installation is made possible by The Modern Circle.
Image Credit: Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt). Venezuelan, born Germany, 1912–1994. Drawing without Paper (detail) 86/18, 1986. Iron, aluminum, and nylon. 49 5/8 × 18 7/8 × 9/16 in. (126 × 48 × 1.5 cm). Gift of Lilly Scarpetta, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2020.
The museum is open Sunday–Tuesday and Thursday: 10 am–5 pm
Friday and Saturday: 10 am–9 pm
Closed Wednesday
No advance reservations or timed tickets are required. Once inside, Members and advance ticket buyers may proceed directly into the Museum galleries. If you’re eligible for suggested admission, please proceed to the ticketing desk.
Face coverings are required for all visitors age 2 and older, even if you are vaccinated. In keeping with public health recommendations, we strongly recommend vaccinations for our visitors.

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective
2022-03-08 10:00 - 2022-06-12 17:30 | Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90049, United States
In a career that spanned seventy years, Imogen Cunningham created a large and diverse body of work — from portraits, to nudes, to florals, and to street photographs. In a field dominated by men, she was one of a handful of women who helped to shape early modernist photography in America. This exhibition seeks to acknowledge her stature as equivalent to that of her male peers and to reevaluate her enormous contribution to twentieth century photographic history.
The museum is open from 10-5:30 Tues – Sunday. Admission is free, and requires a timed-entry reservation. Check visit information and current safety measure requirements >
Two Callas (detail), 1925–29, Imogen Cunningham. Gelatin silver print, 30 x 22.6 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Julien Levy Collection, Gift of Jean Levy and the Estate of Julien Levy, 1988.157.24 / Art Resource, NY. © Imogen Cunningham Trust.

A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper
2022-02-13 08:00 - 2022-05-01 17:00 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
The inaugural presentation in the Hammer Museum’s new works on paper gallery highlights acquisitions of prints and drawings from 2012 to the present. Over the last decade, through purchases and many generous gifts, the museum has built a robust collection in this medium. This exhibition shows, for the first time, many contemporary prints and drawings in the collection, ranging from the conceptual to the political, the abstract, the gestural, and the poetic.
Artists of the 1960s generation such as Richard Artschwager, Vija Celmins, Sonia Gutiérrez, Betye Saar, and Sue Williamson are included, with beautiful examples made using diverse printmaking techniques. Also featured is a selection of drawings by Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Charles Burchfield, Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, Judy Chicago, Mary Corse, Sam Gilliam, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and David Smith. The exhibition also includes artists such as Huma Bhabha, Trisha Donnelly, Sharon Hayes, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, and Rachel Whiteread whose contemporary practices are represented with innovative and experimental works on paper.
This exhibition is the first of two showcasing recent acquisitions and promised gifts.
A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper is organized by Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director for curatorial affairs and director of the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, and Connie Butler, chief curator.
The Gallery is open Tues – Sunday from 11am – 6pm
Admission is Free

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective
2021-11-18 10:00 - 2022-02-06 17:00 | Seattle Art Museum, 1300 1st Ave, Seattle, WA, 98101, United States
Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective showcases the endless innovation and profound influence of this remarkable photographer who pushed the boundaries for both women in the arts and photography as an art form. Nearly 200 of Cunningham’s insightful portraits, elegant flower and plant studies, poignant street pictures, and groundbreaking nudes present a singular vision developed over seven decades of work. The first major retrospective in the United States of Cunningham’s work in 35 years, the exhibition examines on the artist’s Seattle upbringing and includes works by female artists such as Ruth Asawa and Martha Graham who Cunningham championed, as well as works by Group f/64 which she helped found with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others. Cunningham’s spark of creative possibility asserted photography as a distinct and valuable art form in the 20th century.

This exhibition is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Presenting Sponsor
ArtsFund
Major Sponsor
National Endowment for the Arts
Generous Support
Herman and Faye Sarkowsky Endowment
Mary and Dean Thornton Endowment Fund
Adults: 29.99 at least a day in advance, and 32.99 day of.
Check pricing >
The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays
In accordance with the latest Public Health—Seattle & King County order, all visitors age 12 and older must show proof of full vaccination or a negative COVID-19 PCR test to enter the museum. Additionally, masks are required for all individuals over the age of two regardless of vaccination. Subject to change.
Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible
2021-11-04 10:00 - 2021-12-18 18:00 | David Zwirner New York W 20th St., 537 W 20th St., New York, NY, 10011, United States
David Zwirner is pleased to present Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Organized by Helen Molesworth, this exhibition aims to situate Asawa’s (1926–2013) iconic looped- and tied-wire sculptures in the context of her extraordinary drawings and her lesser known sculptural forms, offering viewers one of the most comprehensive looks at this artist’s work to date. This larger context illuminates an artist in pursuit of form as a means to reshape how we see and perceive the world as well as offering a model for thinking about the avant-garde’s long-held desire to place art and life in a permanently dynamic conversation.
The Estate of Ruth Asawa has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017. The gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition of the artist’s work took place the same year in New York. In 2020, the gallery’s London location presented Ruth Asawa: A Line Can Go Anywhere, which was the first major presentation of the artist’s work outside of the United States. In 2022, Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe will open at Modern Art Oxford, England, and will subsequently travel to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway.
Open Tues – Sat. 10-6
Photo: Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, 1968 (detail)

Women in Abstraction
2021-10-22 11:00 - 2022-02-27 19:00 | Guggenheim Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Bilbo, Bizkaia, 48009, Spain
Women in Abstraction aims to trace a lesser-told history of art primarily from the 20th and 21st centuries by focusing on the contribution of women artists to abstraction. The exhibition includes over 100 artists working across disciplines, such as dance, applied arts, photography, film, and performance art from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, Europe, and the United States in order to tell an expansive and complex story with many voices.
Many exhibitions dealing with abstraction underestimate the fundamental role played by women in the development of this movement. By focusing on the paths of artists, some of whom were unfairly ignored, the exhibition proposes another history. Women in Abstraction brings to light the decisive turning points that have marked this movement, evoking both the research undertaken by artists, individually or as a group, and the founding exhibitions.
Exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
With the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The exhibition was conceived by Christine Macel, Chief Curator at the Centre Pompidou, and Karolina Lewandowska, Director of the Museum of Warsaw in addition to Curator of Photography, and organized in collaboration with Lekha Hileman Waitoller, Curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
12€ Adults – 6€ Senior – 6€ Students
From 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Image: Sonia Delaunay
Electric Prisms (Prismes électriques), 1914
Oil on canvas
250 x 250 cm
Purchased by the State, 1958
Attributed, 1958
Centre Pompidou Collection, Paris, Musée national d’Art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
Image © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/ Philippe Migeat/
Dist. RMN-GP
© Pracusa S.A.

Artist's Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft
2021-07-20 10:30 - 2022-01-09 17:30 | MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, 10019, United States
In A Raft, Yto Barrada—an artist known for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives—explores how artworks can provide models for reimagining relationships and alternative ways of being in our world.
In this latest iteration of MoMA’s Artist’s Choice exhibition series, Barrada has gathered works from the Museum’s collection that resonate with the ideas and work of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny (1913–1996). Barrada’s exploration centers on Deligny’s work from the late 1960s, when he lived together with other volunteers and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in an informal network in rural France; this was an attempt to create a new way of living “outside language,” adapted for the nonverbal children. Deligny called this independent project “a raft,” envisioning it as lightweight and maneuverable, and requiring constant maintenance—an alternative to the “cargo ships” of the psychiatric institutions. Particularly resonant today, Deligny’s emancipatory ideas are being rediscovered widely, by philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, filmmakers, and artists.
Renewed interest in Deligny’s life’s work is largely due to his publishers Sandra Alvarez de Toledo and Anaïs Masson, Barrada’s longtime friends with whom she has collaborated closely on this exhibition. For Barrada, “Deligny’s search for new maps and modes of being represent a vital heritage for artists.” In bringing together selected works by artists including Anni Albers, Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, David Hammons, and Bruce Nauman with films, maps, writing, and photographs that document Deligny’s revolutionary project, Barrada invites us to consider art in relationship to language in ways that might inspire us elsewhere in our lives.
Organized by Yto Barrada with Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator, and River Encalada Bullock, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography.
MoMA is open daily, from 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
We are open until 7:00 p.m. on Saturdays.

Lineage: Paul Klee and Ruth Asawa
2021-07-10 08:00 - 2021-12-05 17:00 | SF MOMA, 151 Third St, San Francisco, CA, 94103
Drawing is a line that “goes out for a walk,” wrote the Swiss-born Modernist Paul Klee (1879–1940). Klee’s dynamic lines and rhythmic patterns have been a catalyst for generations of artists, including California-born Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). Asawa first encountered Klee’s art and writing through her Black Mountain professor Josef Albers, with whom Klee had taught at the Bauhaus, a revolutionary art school in Germany. She later noted — evoking Klee — that she was interested in “the economy of a line” because “a line can go anywhere.” This presentation highlights the affinity between Klee’s compositional approach and Asawa’s explorations of line and shape in works she created at Black Mountain College and in her first years in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949.
Museum Hours:
Hours
Mon 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Tue + Wed Closed
Thu 1 p.m.–8 p.m.
Fri–Sun 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Adult: $25, Senior: $22, YA: $19
Teens and Children FREE
Check website.

Women in Abstraction
2021-05-19 12:00 - 2021-08-23 20:00 | Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004, Paris
The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s.
“Women in Abstraction” provides an opportunity to discover artists who represent discoveries both for the specialist and for the general public. It showcases the work of many of these women who suffer from a lack of visibility and recognition beyond the frontiers of their countries. Reviewing their specific contribution to the history of abstraction, the exhibition focuses on the careers of artists who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art.
11 am – 8 pm, every day except Tuesdays. Online reservation required.
Photo by Delphine Paris, Artwork © 2021 Estate of Ruth Asawa / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Courtesy Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner

Experiments On Stone: Four Women Artists From The Tamarind Lithography Workshop
2021-03-10 - 2022-05-03 | Online
Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop explores the prints produced by a group of artists at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, and Louise Nevelson each completed two-month fellowships at Tamarind during the 1960s. Though they did not overlap with one another during their residencies, the connective thread between their varied bodies of work is the workshop itself.
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Founded by artist June Wayne in 1960, Tamarind was conceived to fill a void in the output of prints produced by artists in the United States. The workshop was an essential site for experimentation and collaboration between artists and printers in Los Angles in the 1960s. Emphasizing collaboration, innovation, professionalization, and training, Tamarind served as a site for artists and printers alike to revive the medium of lithography in the United States, a technique which had dwindled just after mid-century due to economic pressures and the lack of master printers and print shops. Under the directorship of Wayne, several women artists were given the space to create and further the medium of lithography with unprecedented access to studio space and printers.
These four artists all worked primarily in media outside of printmaking for a majority of their careers—Albers is known for her textiles and weaving while Asawa, Gego, and Nevelson each developed unique sculptural practices. The fellowship at Tamarind proved to be a fruitful period for developing each of their practices, using lithography to work through their three-dimensional concerns and ideas on a two-dimensional surface. Situating these lithographs alongside sculptural or textile examples, this exhibition places this period of work in direct dialogue with each artist’s larger œuvre. Experiments on Stone explores each artist’s distinct inquiry into printmaking, underscoring the importance of this experimental time in each of the artists’ respective careers.
Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop is organized by MCASD Assistant Curator Alana Hernandez and made possible by gifts to the annual operating fund. Institutional support of MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.
This exhibition is part of the Feminist Art Coalition, a national platform for art projects that seek to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action. Working collectively, art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States will present concurrent events beginning in the fall of 2020.
Photo: Desert Plant
1965, Color Lithograph, 18 1/2 × 18 1/2in. (47 × 47cm). Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Martin L. Gleich, San Diego, California.

Crafting America
2021-02-06 08:00 - 2021-05-31 17:00 | Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, AR, 72712, United States
Crafting America, a new exhibition developed by Crystal Bridges, celebrates the skill and individuality of craft within the broad context of American art. From jewelry to furniture to sculptures and more, this exhibition is dazzling and full of surprises.
Featuring over 100 works in ceramics, fiber, wood, metal, glass, and more unexpected materials, Crafting America presents a diverse and inclusive story of American craft from the 1940s to today, highlighting the work of artists such as Ruth Asawa, Beatrice Wood, Shan Goshorn, Nick Cave, and more. Craft has long been a realm accessible to the broadest range of individuals, providing an opportunity to explore personal creativity, innovation, and technical skill. This exhibition foregrounds varied backgrounds and perspectives in craft, from the vital contributions of Indigenous artists to the new skills and points of view brought by immigrants to the United States.
Developed by Jen Padgett, associate curator at Crystal Bridges, and Glenn Adamson, guest curator and scholar of craft, design history, and contemporary art, Crafting America asserts craft’s integral role in expanding the story of American art and is accompanied by a major multi-author illustrated publication published by Crystal Bridges and the University of Arkansas Press. The video lecture discusses Asawa’s work at 39:00.
Crystal Bridges is open Wed. through Mon. with free, timed tickets required. Admission to the exhibition is:
Adults: $12
Members, SNAP participants, Veterans, and Youth 18 and Under: FREE

Connecting Legacies: A First Look at the Dreier Black Mountain College Archive
2021-01-27 08:00 - 2021-05-17 17:00 | Asheville Art Museum, 2 South Pack Square, Asheville, NC, 28801, United States
Black Mountain College was founded in order to provide a place where free use might be made of tested and proved methods of education and new methods tried out in a purely experimental spirit. There is full realization, however, of the fact that experiment is, for the individual, also experience; hence, no experiment is being tried which is not submitted beforehand to the test of reasonable likelihood of good results. It is for this reason that the College is for the present content to place emphasis upon combining those experiments and the results of those experiences which have already shown their value in educational institutions of the western world, but which are often isolated and prevented from giving their full value because of their existence side by side with thoughtless tradition.”
—Text from first BMC Catalogue, 1933
“This is lydia see, curator of Connecting Legacies. Archives are collections of records, such as letters, newspapers, and photographs, also known as primary source materials. Museums often look to primary source materials for a variety of reasons: to add context to research about artworks, artists, and the historical framework within which something was made.
Displayed in this gallery are archival objects shown alongside works from the Museum’s Black Mountain College Collection, which is comprised of over 1000 artworks and ephemera. These objects create connections, each one a thread contributing to a nuanced tapestry of the people, materials, geographies, and ideas of Black Mountain College and its ongoing legacy.
Highlighted in this exhibition are materials which focus on underrepresented narratives and the women and people of color of Black Mountain College. For instance, during the Summer Music Institute of 1944, almost 10 years to the day before the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court Ruling, Alma Stone Williams became the first African American student invited to BMC. The following summer, musicians Roland Hayes and Carol Brice were welcomed to the College as its first African American Faculty. Programs from their performances are curated alongside student artworks made around the same time.
This exhibition encourages viewers to find connections running between artworks and items from the Theodore Dreier Sr. Document Collection and invites the consideration of how the presence of primary sources impacts the experience of engaging with art.”
This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and curated by lydia see, fall 2020 Black Mountain College fellow, with support from a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant through the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Ruth Asawa: Drawing In Space
2020-11-30 08:00 - 2020-12-19 17:00 | David Zwirner New York 69th St., 34 East 69th Street, New York, NY, 10021, United States
While best known for her innovative wire sculptures, Asawa had a deep connection to drawing and painting and often depicted plants, flowers, and other organic forms across her work that spanned fifty years. Here, we present a selection of the artist’s smaller sculptures along with prints and works on paper, many of which have not been widely shown.
On the occasion of an installation of wire sculptures, drawings, and lithographs by Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner’s 69th Street gallery in New York, this online presentation offers a view of the investigations of material and form, often inspired by nature, that defined the artist’s career for half a century.
The gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10AM–6PM.
Please note we are following these COVID-19 precautions:
– Face masks are required
– Only 6 visitors are allowed in at a time
– Observe social distancing of 6+ feet
Appointments are encouraged but not required >
View the online presentation >

Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects
2020-11-20 08:00 - 2021-04-30 17:00 | Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY, 10014, United States
This focused exhibition, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, will look at the creative and irreverent ways that seven artists—Ruth Asawa, Sari Dienes, Pati Hill, Kahlil Robert Irving, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, and Zarina—have employed the everyday objects around them to make prints. Nothing Is So Humble takes its title from an evocative proposition by Dienes that recognized aesthetic possibilities in the most mundane of subjects: “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”
The artists in this exhibition share an unconventional approach to printmaking. Rather than mark a metal plate or carve into a block of wood, they have worked directly with the stuff of their environments: making a rubbing from a maintenance hole cover, photocopying a hairbrush, running nylon stockings through an etching press, or even pressing a slice of prosciutto onto a printing plate.
The resulting surface impressions—at once precise and abstracted—capture intimate views of their commonplace subjects that teeter between recognizable and elusive. By making visible what might otherwise be overlooked, these works transform ordinary encounters into poetic and poignant accounts of our world.
This exhibition is organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints.
The Museum is $25 adults
$18 Senior, Student, Disability
Pay What You Wish on Fridays, 6–9 pm.
All visitors and members must book timed tickets in advance. Please note that the Whitney is operating at a significantly reduced capacity for your safety, and same-day tickets may be extremely limited.

Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction
2020-08-25 09:00 - 2021-12-12 17:00 | Nora Eccles Harrison Museum Of Art, 650 North 1100 East, Logan, UT, 84322, United States
Drawn exclusively from the Museum collection, Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction endeavors to look beyond typical art historical boundaries and to begin to lay claim to a more holistic and complex view of art history—one that includes parties left out because of aesthetic biases based on a system of privileged white male patrimony.
During the 20th century, art made by women was often overlooked or dismissed by museums, collectors, and art historians. An ironic side effect of this absence of attention was that it lessened the constraints and dictates of the marketplace for women, allowing for increased experimentation and the pursuit of a personal vision in ways often less available for their male counterparts.
Until more recently, women of color—especially Native American women—have rarely been included in art historical studies focusing on Surrealism and abstraction. In addition, artists who work in ceramics, fiber arts, photography, and printmaking, rather than painting and sculpture, are often left out of these studies as well. However, Surrealism and abstraction offered women a glimpse of a world in which creative activity and liberation from societal expectations co-existed, allowing them to embark on the difficult path to artistic freedom. Visit the website for virtual and audio tours.
We are now limiting Museum attendance to 25 visitors at a time and require reservations. Photo: Margaret Tomkins Untitled
Wednesday 12pm – 5pm
Thursday 12pm – 5pm
Friday 12pm – 7pm
Saturday 10am – 3pm
Sunday – Tuesday CLOSED

50x50 San Jose Museum of Art Publishes Online Catalog
2020-08-18 - 2022-05-02 | Online
SJMA has published an online catalog titled 50X50: Stories of Visionary Artists from the Collection that features 50 artists. Learn about their lives, what inspired them, and what materials they used. Each artist chapter has been carefully researched and diligently cited. Featuring the artists’ own words via video and audio files. Large-scale artworks are available for your enjoyment.
View now >

Question Everything! The Women of Black Mountain College
2020-01-24 11:00 - 2020-04-25 17:00 | Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 120 College Street, Ashville, NC, 28801, United States
This exhibition will celebrate the work and impact of the women associated with Black Mountain College, featuring borrowed works alongside pieces from the BMCM+AC collection by a wide-ranging group of artists including Anni Albers, Suzi Gablik, Ruth Asawa, Jo Sandman, M.C. Richards, and Hazel Larsen Archer.
BMC was a place where women could explore their identities as artists and individuals; a space where women were expected to question things, to think critically and to explore their own self determinacy. Through artworks, personal accounts and archival film and photographs, Question Everything! details how this new generation went forward with a strong sense of what it meant to be a woman in the 20th century, forging new paths for themselves and those who followed in their footsteps.
The museum is open Mon – Sat.
Admission is free with suggested donation.
This exhibition is supported by The Beattie Foundation, John Byrd + Ellen Clarke, Marion L. Johnson Church, Mr. + Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation, Thomas Frank, and the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Special thanks to: The Britton family, Connie Bostic, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Sarah Downing, Johanna Engebrecht, Katherine French, Suzi Gablik, Lorrie Goulet, Rob Hazelgrove + Dan McLawhorn, Hudson + Terry Lanier, Rebecca Lowell, Michael Manes, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, Donna Marie Perkins, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Jo Sandman, Susan Rhew Design, Heather South, Western Regional Archives, and Erika Zarow.
Preview the Exhibition >
Learn more about life at Black Mountain College, and Asawa’s time there >
View more of the work she created at Black Mountain >
Top photo: Untitled S.529 (Wall-Mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes), ca. 1970s
Ruth Asawa, Ink and paper

A Line Can Go Anywhere
2020-01-10 10:00 - 2020-02-22 17:00 | David Zwirner London, 24 Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EZ, United Kingdom
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) at the gallery’s London location. This will be the first major presentation of the artist’s work outside of the United States and will include a number of her key forms, focusing in particular on the relationship between her wire sculptures and wide-ranging body of works on paper.
An influential artist, devoted activist, and tireless advocate for arts education, Asawa is best known for her extensive body of hanging wire sculptures. These intricate, dynamic, and sinuous works, begun in the late 1940s, continue to challenge conventional notions of sculpture through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Relentlessly experimental across a range of mediums, Asawa also produced numerous drawings and prints that, like her wire sculptures, are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Although she moved between abstract and figurative registers in her sculptures and drawings, respectively, viewed together, the works in this exhibition nevertheless incite a rich dialogue and find commonality in their sustained emphasis on the natural world and its forms, as well as in their deft use of the basic aesthetic concept of the line.
“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”
Image: Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, at Her Door, 1963 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham. © 2020 Imogen Cunningham Trust

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019
2019-11-22 10:30 - 2022-02-01 18:00 | Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY, 10014, United States
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums. The traces of the artists’ hands-on engagement with their materials invite viewers to imagine how it might feel to make each work.
While artists’ reasons for taking up craft range widely, many aim to subvert prevalent standards of so-called “fine art,” often in direct response to the politics of their time.
In challenging accepted ideas of taste—whether by embracing the decorative or turning away from traditional painting and sculpture in favor of functional items like bowls or blankets—these artists reclaim visual languages that have typically been coded as feminine, domestic, or vernacular. By highlighting marginalized modes of artistic production, these artists challenge the power structures that determine artistic value.
This exhibition provides new perspectives on subjects that have been central to artists, including abstraction, popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of identity and relationships to place. Together, the works demonstrate that craft-informed techniques of making carry their own kind of knowledge, one that is crucial to a more complete understanding of the history and potential of art.
Drawn primarily from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition will include over eighty works by more than sixty artists, including Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Liza Lou, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine Reichek, and Lenore Tawney, as well as featuring new acquisitions by Shan Goshorn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Simone Leigh, Jordan Nassar, and Erin Jane Nelson.
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 is curated by Jennie Goldstein, assistant curator, and Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator, with Ambika Trasi, curatorial assistant.
Support for Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 is provided by the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.
Photo: Liza Lou, Kitchen, 1991-96. Beads, plaster, wood and found objects, 96 × 132 × 168 in. (243.8 × 335.3 × 426.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Peter Norton 2008.339a-x. © Liza Lou. Photograph by Tom Powel, courtesy the artist
All museum visitors must book timed tickets in advance.
https://whitney.org/visit
$25
Adults
$18
Seniors, Students, and Visitors with Disabilities
Free
18 and under
The museum is closed on Tuesdays, and is open 10:30 to 6:00 every day except Friday, when it’s open until 10pm

The Pencil Is a Key
2019-10-11 12:00 - 2020-01-05 18:00 | The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, NY, 10013, United States
Drawings by Incarcerated Artists
The Pencil Is a Key is an exhibition of historical and contemporary drawings by incarcerated people from all over the globe. Works by artists who were or currently are prisoners will be juxtaposed with drawings by prisoners who became artists while incarcerated. Examples include drawings by political prisoners like Gustave Courbet, who was held in Saint Pélagie Prison for his role in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871; artists incarcerated during World War II as noncombatents like Hans Bellmer, who was interned in France, and a young Ruth Asawa, who was interned by the US government because she was a Japanese American; as well as artists in Soviet Gulags, Apartheid-era South Africa, in Central and South American countries under military dictatorships, and in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. The exhibition will also present drawings by members of contemporary American prison populations who found their talent through prison art programs, as well as collections of works by anonymous contemporary artist incarcerates working in drawing genres specific to prison life, like “Paños Chicanos” drawn on handkerchiefs, or envelope drawings meant to be sold or delivered through the mail.
Drawing is vital to those in captivity; it is a vehicle through which they proclaim their individuality, express their hope, and imagine their freedom. The drawings featured in this exhibition present powerful evidence of the persistence of human creativity in the most inhumane of circumstances and argue for the necessity of art—in the form of drawing—to the life of every human being. Created in extreme circumstances, the drawings in this show are weapons in the fight for justice, records that bear witness to terrible circumstances, containers of memory, and portals to a better future. Their very existence is of great significance, but their genius offers the proof of drawing’s purpose as well as the clearest explanation of why institutions like The Drawing Center must continue to present art to the public.
Image: Azza Abo Rebieh (1980–), Nayfeh, 2016. Pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
The Drawing Center is closed on Monday & Tuesday
Admission for students and seniors is $3
Admission is free Thursdays, 6–8pm,
and at all times for the following:
Children under 12
Members
Visitors with disabilities and
a person accompanying them.

Women Take the Floor
2019-09-13 08:00 - 2021-05-03 17:00 | Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, 02115
“Women Take the Floor” challenges the dominant history of American art by focusing on the overlooked and underrepresented work and stories of women artists. This reinstallation—or “takeover”—of Level 3 of the Art of the Americas Wing advocates for diversity, inclusion, and gender equity in museums, the art world, and beyond. With more than 250 works drawn primarily from the MFA’s collection, the exhibition is organized into seven thematic galleries.
Presented in the Saundra B. and William H. Lane Galleries, Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture highlights pioneering artists who radically redefined textiles as modern art in the 1960s and 1970s: Anni Albers, Olga de Amaral, Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks, Kay Sekimachi and Lenore Tawney. The second rotation, opening in spring 2020, focuses on contemporary artists using the medium of textiles (embroidery, weaving, printed fabric, and quilts) to challenge notions of identity, gender, and politics.

In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury
2019-08-16 08:00 - 2020-01-12 17:00 | Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603, 60603, United States
The work of Clara Porset, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Sargent, and Sheila Hicks has never been shown together before. While some of these artists and designers knew one another and collaborated together, they are from different generations, and their individual work encompasses a range of media varying from furniture and interior design to sculpture, textiles, photography, and prints. They all, however, share one defining aspect: Mexico, a country in which they all lived or worked between the 1940s and 1970s. During this period they all realized projects that breached disciplinary boundaries and national divides.

“There is design in everything … in a cloud, in a wall, in a chair, in the sea, in the sand, in a pot.” —Clara Porset, 1952
This exhibition is the first to explore Mexico’s impact on these visionary artists and designers. It takes its title from a quote by Clara Porset, a political exile from Cuba who became one of Mexico’s most prominent modern furniture designers. Influenced by Bauhaus ideas, she believed that design could reshape cities, elevate the quality of life, and solve large-scale social problems. This approach informed her 1952 exhibition Art in Daily Life, in whose catalogue she wrote, “There is design in everything … in a cloud, in a wall, in a chair, in the sea, in the sand, in a pot,” encouraging us to look at both the natural and machine world for inspiration and ideas.
Arriving in Mexico City in 1935, Porset started her design studio in the early 1940s. Inspired by the country’s climate, lifestyles, aesthetic and cultural traditions, and political progressivism following the end of the Mexican Revolution (roughly 1920), she conceived designs to be made from local materials and used both handmade and industrial manufacturing techniques.
Mexican artist Lola Álvarez Bravo, a close friend and collaborator of Porset, was one of few women photographers working in the country during this period. Her photographs are essential to understanding Porset’s no longer extant projects, and her dynamic photomontages, created by cutting and pasting together parts of different photographs to create new images, provide insights into Mexico’s richly layered social, political, and geographical landscape during the 1940s and 1950s.
Porset was also friends with German émigré Anni Albers. Encouraged to visit Mexico by Porset, she first traveled to the country in 1935 and made 13 subsequent trips. Mexico’s landscape and architecture became a vital source of inspiration and remained so throughout her career, providing an abstract visual language for her designs. The triangle motif, for instance, that she used repeatedly in textiles and screenprints was drawn from archaeological Zapotec sites such as Monte Albán.
Mexico also left a deep impression on Japanese American Ruth Asawa. In 1947, two years after taking a class with Porset at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she returned to the country and was drawn to the artistry in utilitarian looped-wire baskets that she encountered in Toluca. From then on, sculptures made with this wire technique became her primary practice.
Learn more >
