New York,
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth in California of Ruth Asawa, a sculptor who worked with simple lines and materials in pieces closely connected to her life and those close to her.
She was part of a family of Japanese immigrants and those origins determined her life: in World War II (1942), she was forced to move to one of the internment camps for Japanese in the United States and she remained there, with her family, for two years. His circumstances were inevitably harsh, but in that place Asawa’s concerns began to be awakened, and he keenly observed the surrounding nature and the lines that trapped them, the germ of which he would later lead to his suspended sculptures. In addition, she would be instructed in that field by those who had been cartoonists for Walt Disney studios.
Once the war was over, in 1946, he entered Black Mountain College, the artistic school that did not provide its students with degrees, but with a particular sense of commitment and community: there he was able, in a natural and open environment, to delve into his concerns and the paths through which he could channel them, and he experimented with materials through austere procedures.
Not long after, this author would learn about the Mexican crafts of Tolupa, and her wire baskets especially caught her attention: from then on, this would be the fundamental raw material of her creations; He wove, twisted and knotted it, letting himself be inspired by the shapes he found in the landscape and by his own desire for lightness.
Those works, which due to their succession of curved lines have been called loop sculpturescould cast shadows on the wall when light was applied to them; They then seem like lanterns suspended in the air, but very often they also refer to wombs: the artist was the mother of six children and her life experience was always part of her creative processes. He never sought to dissociate them.
In part, that wire, those domestic references and that relationship with her own motherhood were the reasons why, at first, her production did not achieve critical recognition. She did not back down and decided to combine it with teaching: she devised art education programs for disadvantaged children and launched the center that preceded, in 1982, the San Francisco public art school, which today bears her name.
The first extensive retrospective of Asawa in a museum can be visited, until next February, at the MoMA in New York and commemorates, precisely, the centenary of his birth: it consists of wire sculptures, bronze castings, paintings and an extensive set of works on paper dated throughout his sixty years of career. They are accompanied by numerous archival material focused, above all, on his public commissions -among them a monument to the Japanese interned in the war, in San José-, on the community ties of his legacy (from the beginning to the end of his career) and his defense of creativity: we are talking about photographs, documents and some objects.
The exhibition, organized together with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – where it comes from, and in March 2026 will travel to the Guggenheim Bilbao; later to the Fondation Beyeler -, has been curated by Cara Manes and Janet Bishop and follows a (flexible) chronological order, in which thematic sections are interspersed that dissect the artist’s sources and methods.
The tour begins with a selection of works from his time at Black Mountain College, including explorations of materials, colors and shapes in drawings, collages and prints, and then delve into his activity with wire and paper in San Francisco, where he worked for a united social community.
There he articulated the key motifs and shapes of his loop structures and expanded his repertoire of drawing, printmaking, and paper folding techniques, while accepting various commercial design commissions and exhibiting regularly at the Peridot Gallery in New York.
In the early 1960s, Asawa discovered a new method of working with wire, tying and spreading it so that it evoked organic, delicately botanical-inspired arrangements. Likewise, he continued experimenting with these natural forms during a residency at the Tamarind lithography workshop in Los Angeles in 1965, where he produced a portfolio of diverse prints, as rigorous as they were innovative.
A selection of compositions from this portfolio, from MoMA’s collection, have been included in the exhibition, and many of them are being shown to the public for the first time.
“Ruth Asawa. A Retrospective”
MoMA. THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan
New York
Until February 7, 2026
