Ruth Asawa

The Campaign for Art: Modern and Contemporary
2016-05-14 - 2016-09-18 | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
This exhibition — one of several highlighting contributions from the museum’s Campaign for Art — introduces the range and quality of these newly committed and gifted works in a multidisciplinary selection that strengthens and deepens SFMOMA’s collection. Asawa’s Untitled (S.046a-d) is a rare instance where she created four separate works that are intended to be exhibited together.

Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture Since 1900
2016-05-14 - 2016-09-30 | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
This presentation of masterworks and experimental pieces from SFMOMA’s collection of painting and sculpture explores themes that have shaped the history of modern art from the early twentieth century to our own time. Organized as a series of chapters, the exhibition focuses on revolutionary ideas, geographical centers, individual artists, and relationships between artists. Together, the works in Open Ended explore the complexities and even contradictions of modern and contemporary art, suggesting new interpretations of the museum’s collection, and examining the passions and beliefs that have spurred artists’ creativity in a rapidly changing world. Asawa’s Untitled (S.114) was added to the collection through the Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions.

Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016
2016-03-13 - 2016-09-04 | Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, 901 East Third Street, Los Angeles, 90013
Los Angeles… On March 13, 2016, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opened its doors to present ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016’, the inaugural exhibition at its new complex in the heart of the downtown Los Angeles Arts District. Through nearly 100 works made by 34 artists over the past seventy years, this ambitious undertaking traces ways in which women have changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the postwar period. Works on view reveal their makers inventing radically new forms and processes that privilege solo studio practice, tactility, and the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s own hand. ‘Revolution in the Making’ explores multiple strains of artistic approaches, characterized by abstraction and repetition, that reject the precedent of a monolithic masterwork on a pedestal, employing such tactics as stacking, hanging, and intertwining, to create an intimate reciprocity between artist and viewer. The exhibition examines how elements that are central to art today – including engagement with found, experimental, and recycled materials, as well as an embrace of contingency, imperfection, and unstructured play – were propelled by the work of women who, in seeking new means to express their own voices, dramatically expanded the definition of sculpture.
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Leap Before You Look at the Hammer Museum
2016-02-21 - 2016-05-15 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933 – 1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Knight Lawrence, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, among many others, taught and studied at BMC. Teaching at the college combined the craft principles of Germany’s revolutionary Bauhaus school with interdisciplinary inquiry, discussion, and experimentation, forming the template for American art schools. While physically rooted in the rural South, BMC formed an unlikely cosmopolitan meeting place for American, European, Asian, and Latin American art, ideas, and individuals. The exhibition argues that BMC was as an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, democracy, and globalism. It examines the college’s critical role in shaping many major concepts, movements, and forms in postwar art and education, including assemblage, modern dance and music, and the American studio craft movement–influence that can still be seen and felt today.
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Architecture of Life
2016-01-31 - 2016-05-29 | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, 94704, United States
Architecture of Life, the inaugural exhibition in BAMPFA’s landmark new building, explores the ways that architecture—as concept, metaphor, and practice—illuminates various aspects of life experience: the nature of the self and psyche, the fundamental structures of reality, and the power of the imagination to reshape our world. Occupying every gallery in the new building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the exhibition comprises over two hundred works of art in a wide range of media, as well as scientific illustrations and architectural drawings and models, made over the past two thousand years. Boundary-breaking, innovative, and radically interdisciplinary, the exhibition presents visually exquisite, rarely seen works in ways that suggest new connections and meanings. A wonderful lecture series accompanies this exhibit. Learn more >>
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The Whitney's Collection
2015-09-28 - 2016-04-06 | Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY, 10014, United States
The more than two hundred works on display on the seventh and sixth floors represent a selection of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection. Organized in a rough chronological sequence beginning on the seventh floor, the presentation is divided into eleven thematic “chapters.” Each chapter takes its name not from a movement or style but from the title of a work that evokes the section’s animating impulse. The exhibition elaborates some of the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Works of art across all mediums are displayed together, acknowledging the ways in which artists have engaged various modes of production and dissolved the boundaries between them.
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Ruth Asawa: Permanent Installation
2005-10-17 - 2020-10-17 | de Young Museum, Education Tower, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, 94118, United States
In 2005, in celebration of the opening of the redesigned de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Ruth Asawa donated 15 sculptures to the Fine Arts Museums for a permanent installation. This grouping was personally selected by Asawa as being excellent examples of many of her sculptural forms. In keeping with Asawa’s belief that art should be readily accessible to all, these works are housed in the Education Tower, where there is no charge for visitors.
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