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.
Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to examine Ruth Asawa’s oeuvre through the lens of her lifelong drawing practice.
With over 150 works by an international and transhistorical roster of artists, this exhibition reveals how shifting relations among abstract art, fashion, design, and craft shaped recurrent aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political forces, as they, in turn, were impacted by modernist art forms.
The exhibition presents drawings, collages, watercolors, and sketchbooks alongside stamped prints, paperfolds, and copper-foil works, showing the breadth of Asawa’s innovative practice.