San Francisco lauds Ruth Asawa in stunning SFMOMA homecoming

San Francisco Chronicle​

07-05-2025

There's a moment in 'Ruth Asawa: Retrospective' that overwhelmed me as an admirer of the San Francisco artist.
Turning the corner in the fourth-floor galleries, I entered a space designed to evoke the living room of Asawa's Noe Valley home, where she lived with her husband, architect Albert Lanier, and their six children, from 1961 until her death. Aged wood and a sense of lived-in warmth put me in the center of Asawa's work as an artist, mother and arts education advocate. The house, where Asawa also kept her studio, was a center of family, community and her arts education advocacy.
Dominating the far wall is a photo from 1969 by Rondal Patridge of the room in all its working beauty. Asawa's daughter Addie Lanier and son Paul Lanier and neighborhood kids sit at a large table, baker's clay figures in the foreground. The family dog, Henry, sits in a child's lap. Among the art in the picture are examples of the hanging, looped-wire sculptures for which Asawa is best known.
Several of those same sculptures now hang above visitors in the gallery, high enough that you can walk under and stare up into them.
'It was definitely emotional for everybody,' said Henry Weverka, the president of Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. As Asawa's grandson, he knows that room intimately. 'I think that picture encapsulates my childhood and who my grandmother was.'
Janet Bishop, the chief curator of SFMOMA and co-curator of 'Ruth Asawa' with Cara Manes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called the living room gallery a testament to the 'seamlessness' of Asawa's life and work.
More Information
'It was important to me not to create an artificial separation between Asawa's studio practice and her family life,' said Bishop. 'The house was an epicenter of her production.'
'Ruth Asawa Retrospective" has been in the works for five years and contains more than 300 objects. It is the (overdue) celebration the artist merits. Asawa (1926-2013) remains an enormous presence in San Francisco, with a large concentration of her numerous public projects in the Bay Area found here. Since her death there have been multiple smaller shows of her work across the globe.
'Asawa has had this tremendous resurgence, but my aunts, uncles and my mother have been working at this for 65 years now,' said Weverka, the son of Addie. 'They were the ones who were helping with her public commissions, coiling wire with her in the 1950s, starting to tell her story long before she passed away.'
Asawa spent her childhood in Norwalk (Los Angeles County) the fourth of seven children born to Japanese immigrant farmers. Riding on the back of her father's tractor, she would drag her feet in the dirt and watch the curved, symmetrical shapes they would make in the dust. Asawa's daughter Aiko Cuneo said that farm life was one of the experiences that gave Asawa the discipline and work ethic that became central to her art.
In 1942, Asawa and her family were incarcerated by the United States as part of Executive Order 9022, the Japanese Internment policy during World War II. Her family was taken to a camp in Rohwer, Ark., but her father was separated from the family and taken to a different camp. To have this exhibition mounted now, as the government again forcibly removes immigrants and their families from their homes is a dark parallel that hangs in the air like one of Asawa's sculptures. But it's also a show filled with beauty, and Asawa's life is a testimony to the triumph of hope and creativity over fear and division.
'Retrospective' begins by tracing Asawa's time at Black Mountain College in North Carolina following her incarceration where she studied with Josef Albers, his wife textile and printmaker Anni Albers, and geodesic dome pioneer Buckminster Fuller (who designed Asawa's sterling silver river rock wedding ring, which is on view.)
Asawa's early fascination with repetition is on display in her 'Meandering' drawings, and the organic shapes that would define her sculptures, most notably on an untitled 1948-49 cut paper on plywood work. There's also her earliest experiments with wire using the basket making technique she learned on a 1947 trip to Mexico, beginning with the looped wire basket in which the Albers kept their mail from 1948-49.
'Her experience at Black Mountain was profound, there were so many ways in which it clicked for her, tapping into her natural resourcefulness and openness to using any sorts of materials,' said Bishop.
In 1949, Asawa married fellow Black Mountain College student Lanier in San Francisco, and the 1950s began one of the most productive periods of her life. She not only gave birth to four of the family's six children (two are adopted), but she also began creating the hanging looped wire sculptures that are among her signatures. The galleries with suspended works from that same era feel like walking under the sea amid kelp and creatures of the deep. To see so many of these sculptures at once shows the variety of shape, color wire (from black to copper and gold) as well as the repetition of motifs.
Explorations of Asawa's public commissions also feature in the show, including the famed 'San Francisco Fountain' in Union Square from 1973, with figures formed in bakers' clay by Asawa and students from the Alvarado School Arts Workshop then cast in bronze (a touchable test panel is on display), and the nursing mermaid 'Andrea's Fountain' from 1968 in Ghiradelli Square.
The connections to Asawa's arts education advocacy and motherhood are easily apparent. Some of Asawa's bronze and clay masks of friends and family members are on display, along with casts of Weverka's hands and feet.
A garden on a terrace overlooking Third Street is meant to remind people of the importance of Lanier and Asawa's Noe Valley garden as part of her work, and it sets the stage for the wall mounted and standing tied wire sculptures that echo branches, trees and flowers. Likewise, Asawa's watercolors of fruit, vegetables and flowers, and the botanical drawings from the last decades of her life. In so many of these works on paper, the organic, connecting shapes of the looped wire sculptures still feel ever-present.
'Everything is completely connected,' said Weverka. 'To understand the origins of her work and where she went with it, so many years later, and her continuous exploration of material and form and motif is important. Everything starts from the center and moves outward, and the connectivity across all mediums is always there.'