The Faces Of Ruth Asawa
2022-07-06 11:00 - 2026-07-06 17:00 UTC | Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States
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.
The Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) transforms Stanford into the leading academic and curatorial center for Asian American art. Alexander and Marci Kwon, assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History, serve as AAAI co-directors. As part of the initiative, the Cantor works to build the preeminent collection of Asian American art at a university art museum.
The Cantor acquired Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks) in 2020. On July 6, 2022, they go on long-term view at the museum, marking the first time this work has been shown in its entirety at any museum or public institution. The focused exhibition, The Faces of Ruth Asawa, curated by Alexander, features the masks and three vessels by Asawa’s son Paul Lanier. These special vessels were created with clay mixed with the ashes of Asawa, her husband Albert, and their late son, Adam. Upon Asawa’s death—per her request—Lanier took this material and threw a set of vessels, one for each remaining sibling. The three included in The Faces of Ruth Asawa were borrowed from the family. Their inclusion in the exhibition further demonstrates Asawa’s deeply intimate connection to clay.
Hear from Asawa’s family and friends, including mask subjects, about her process making the masks >
The museum is open Wed – Sun, free with reservations. Reserve here >
End date is open-ended.

In the Presence of: Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association
2024-01-27 12:00 - 2024-04-20 17:00 | Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut Street, Berkeley, CA, 94709, United States
Curated by Christina Hiromi Hobbs
“What is an Asian American woman artist?”
Karin Higa’s influential essay from 2002 recounts the historical exclusion of Asian American women from the male-dominated Asian American movement and the second wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s by tracing the art and lives of the following Asian American women artists: Ruth Asawa, Hisako Hibi, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rea Tajiri, and Hung Liu. The author recognizes the specificities of the artists’ personal and collective histories, generational differences, and artistic practices, and she concludes, “What is the wisdom in grouping the diverse and divergent practices of these artists?”
While recent theorizations of Asian American femininity animated through the registers of ornamentalism, inscrutability, invisibility, and silence have been organized around an understanding of gender formation as an individual process, In the Presence Of returns to Higa’s question “What is an Asian American woman artist?” through the frameworks of kinship, mentorship, intergenerational friendship, and community-building between artists in the group.
The Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) was founded in 1989 by the artists Flo Oy Wong and Betty Kano with the ardent support of art historian Moira Roth as an ecology of support for Asian American women that provided the space for experimentation and the reimagining of “a place of one’s own.” Through the production of exhibitions, slide presentations, symposia, and publications, AAWAA has sought to address Asian American women artists’ historical absence within mainstream art institutions and their misrepresentation within the historical record. Over the past thirty-five years, the association has fostered the creative practices of hundreds of artists and writers in the Bay Area including Lucy Arai, Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lenore Chinn, Terry Acebo Davis, Shari Arai DeBoer, Hisako Hibi, Nancy Hom, Betty Kano, Genny Lim, Hung Liu, Barbara Jane Reyes, Pallavi Sharma, Cynthia Tom, Flo Oy Wong, and Nellie Wong. Founded in the same year that Carlos Villa held the symposia Sources of a Distinct Majority at the San Francisco Art Institute and one year prior to the creation of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network in New York, AAWAA’s ongoing history over the past thirty-five years traces the development of Asian American art from the era of multiculturalism to the present.
Following the Women’s Caucus for Art held in San Francisco in February 1989, Wong and Kano recognized the lack of Asian American participation and leadership, and with the support of Roth the artists reached out to other Asian American women in their network leading to the first meeting of AAWAA. According to Kano, an important recognition that influenced the group’s formation was the realization that “in order to be successful in an art world dominated by white males, people of color needed to control the whole apparatus of art production,” and therefore the association has not only produced exhibitions but also published writing on Asian American women artists and developed relationships with curators and scholars focusing on Asian American art including Karin Higa, Elaine Kim, and Margo Machida. In the Presence Of takes its title from the feeling expressed by members at the early AAWAA meetings that the purpose of the organization at its founding was simply to be together. The exhibition foregrounds the relationships between artists involved in AAWAA as well as forms of remembrance that offered space for healing, reflection, and historicization on the artist’s terms. Through the practices of tributes, gift-giving, and coalition-building, the exhibition seeks to highlight the collective practices between artists that the association has cultivated in order to present an archive that is at once celebratory, messy, caring, disjointed, and most of all, in process, as the association continues to the present day.
The Berkeley Art Center is open from Thurs – Sun 12pm to 5pm.
Photo: Betty Kano. Love Letter #3 (1992) Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 36”

When Forms Come Alive
2024-02-07 08:00 - 2024-05-06 17:00 | hayward gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1, 8XX, United Kingdom
Spanning over 60 years of contemporary sculpture, this exhibition highlights ways in which artists draw on familiar experiences of movement, flux and organic growth.
Inspired by sources ranging from a dancer’s gesture to the breaking of a wave, from a flow of molten metal to the interlacing of a spider’s web, the artworks in When Forms Come Alive conjure fluid and shifting realms of experience.
Undulating, drooping, erupting, cascading and promiscuously proliferating, these sculptures invite a tactile gaze, and trigger physical responses. In an era when our encounters are increasingly digitised and disembodied, these artworks call to mind the pleasures of gesture and movement, the poetics of gravity and the experience of sensation itself.
Palpably dynamic, they proclaim that nothing in the world stays the same, that everything is moving, seething, changing and transforming.
Inviting a tactile gaze and triggering a physical response, When Forms Come Alive is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2024 according to Time Out, Evening Standard and AnOther Magazine.
The exhibition features work by 21 international artists: Ruth Asawa, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Lynda Benglis, Michel Blazy, Paloma Bosquê, Olaf Brzeski, Choi Jeong Hwa, Tara Donovan, DRIFT, Eva Fàbregas, Holly Hendry, EJ Hill, Marguerite Humeau, Jean-Luc Moulène, Senga Nengudi, Ernesto Neto, Martin Puryear, Matthew Ronay, Teresa Solar Abboud and Franz West.
The exhibition is generously supported by the When Forms Come Alive Exhibition Supporters’ Group: Bianca and Stuart Roden, Simon Morris and Annalisa Burello, White Cube, Thomas Dane Gallery, Gagosian, Sprüth Magers, David Zwirner Gallery and Sarah Cannon. Additional support has also kindly been provided by the Henry Moore Foundation, Hauser & Wirth and Fluxus Art Projects.
The Hayward Gallery is open:
Wed – Fri, 10am – 6pm
Sat, 10am – 8pm
Sun, 10am – 6pm
