Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

Organizers: 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.

Curators: 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.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao proudly presents Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, an ambitious exhibition devoted to an iconic artist, Ruth Aiko Asawa (born Norwalk, California, 1926; died San Francisco, California, 2013) in the year that would have been her 100th birthday.

Asawa was one of the most uniquely gifted and productive artists to emerge in the postwar era in the United States. While the appreciation of her work has grown exponentially in the last decade, this international retrospective is the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s exquisite, varied, and groundbreaking practice.

Unfolding across ten sections that span the arc of a six-decade-long career, this exhibition traces the full breadth and depth of the innovative practice of Ruth Asawa, who 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 in this exhibition, 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 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.

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.

Following its presentation at SFMOMA, MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the exhibition will then travel to Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland. International exhibition tour supported by The Henry Luce Foundation