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.
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.
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.
Nigerian British designer Duro Olowu guest curates the 20th installment in Cooper Hewitt’s Selects exhibition series. 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.
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, to talk about the creative friendship between Imogen Cunningham and Ruth Asawa.
Art Making as Life Making: Kinjia Akagawa at Tamarind offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of life in a 1960s print workshop.
The Milk of Dreams takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) in which the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else. The Exhibition The Milk of Dreams takes Leonora Carrington’s otherworldly creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human.
The exhibition features Asawa's 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.
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, and 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.
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.