Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
GUIDED TOUR
March 2026
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective 03.19.2026 - 09.13.2026 “An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special”. —Ruth Asawa Unfolding across ten sections that span the arc of a sixdecade- long career, this exhibition traces the full breadth and depth of the innovative practice of an iconic artist. Ruth Aiko Asawa (b. 1926, Norwalk, California, USA; d. 2013, San Francisco, USA) integrated her creative work with all aspects of her life as an artist, educator and arts advocate. This interconnectedness is illuminated in photographs and ephemera presented alongside and in response to the works featured here, from the suspended looped-wire sculptures for which she is best known to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints. Challenging distinctions between abstraction and representation, figure and ground, and negative and positive space, her work invites us to contemplate how disparate elements interact in a composition, which in turn engages with its surroundings. Asawa was the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant farmers. During World War II, she and her family were forcibly incarcerated by the United States government because of their Japanese ancestry. In 1946, after being denied an art teaching degree because of anti Japanese prejudice, she enrolled at the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the school’s democratic environment, she forged a creative path grounded in experimentation and an ethos of hard, continuous work. From her time at Black Mountain through the end of her life in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949, Asawa situated her artistic practice within set parameters to investigate ideas of transparency, continuity, and space. In the 1960s, she also expanded her life’s work to directly engage her community through public commissions, arts education, and civic advocacy. Taking its cue from the artist’s multifaceted work, this retrospective charts Asawa’s career and legacy, highlighting her ceaseless experimentation with material and form evident in her radical innovations. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The exhibition is co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, SFMOMA, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, in collaboration with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. International exhibition tour supported by The Henry Luce Foundation Curators: Janet Bishop, Cara Manes, with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães Venues: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
