The Faces Of Ruth Asawa
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.
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.
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.
Co-curated by Asawa's daughters Aiko Cuneo and Addie Lanier, this inaugural exhibition includes rarely exhibited looped- and tied-wire sculptures for which she is best-known, cast artworks, paperfolds, watercolors, and drawings on paper and copper foil.
Introductions brings together work from students and faculty across the arts department at
Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, featuring artists, designers, makers, and creative thinkers from
Visual Arts, Architecture & Design, and Costume & Fashion Design.
The selection of work on view illustrates Asawa’s exploration of a familiar motif in different materials including wire, paper, plaster, metallic foil, tin, fabric, and more.
The first European retrospective dedicated to Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), the influential American artist of Japanese descent, offers an extraordinary opportunity to experience the ways in which Asawa transformed the simplest of materials into fascinating object, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, art and craft, action and contemplation.