“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” goes next level when it does more than introduce visitors to Asawa and her artwork by inviting them into Asawa’s home.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) retrospective checks all the boxes you’d expect from one of the nation’s leading museums producing a blockbuster exhibition devoted to one of modern art’s greatest figures.
Bulging at the seams, more than 300 artworks spanning a six-decade career engage the full range of materials and techniques that Asawa employed including her signature looped-wire sculptures. In addition, drawings, prints, paintings, design objects and archival material from U.S.-based public and private collections offer an in-depth look at her expansive output and its inspirations.
“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” goes next level, however, when it does more than introduce visitors to Asawa and her artwork by inviting them into the artist’s home.
In 1949, Asawa moved from North Carolina to San Francisco, the city she would call home for the rest of her life. That year, she exhibited at SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) for the first time. During her lifetime, she participated in some 30 exhibitions at the museum, most notably a mid-career survey in 1973.
SFMOMA’s decades long relationship with and close proximity to Asawa has allowed the museum to construct a gallery recreating her giant, cathedral like wood-paneled den with sculptures hanging from ceiling and items collected from artist friends on shelves. Asawa, her husband Albert Lanier, and their six children moved into an Arts and Crafts style home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood in 1961. This would be the hub of her creative and family life until her passing in 2013.
“I’ve always had my studio in the house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me—or a peanut butter sandwich,” Asawa said.
Artists can produce thousands of pieces over long careers and remain elusive. That statement from Asawa is all anyone would ever need to know about who she was, what she was all about.
The installation reunites a grouping of wire sculptures of various forms and sizes that Asawa is known to have hung from the rafters in her living room, as well as a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and examples of her material experiments in clay, copper, electroplating, and bronze. Highlights of the space are Asawa’s original hand carved redwood doors from the house and works she displayed by other artists, including Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, Peggy Tolk-Watkins, and Marguerite Wildenhain.
“Though she had a studio on the lower level of the home, she preferred working on the main floor, in the living room or kitchen amidst the coming and goings of family and friends,” exhibition co-curator Janet Bishop told Forbes.com. “It was a highly creative environment where she pursued independent work such as her suspended wire sculptures and engaged in side-by-side activities like origami or baker’s clay sculpting.
