Latest news with #RuthAsawa:Retrospective
Business Mayor
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Mayor
A Landmark Exhibition Explores Ruth Asawa's Creative Legacy Over Six Decades
'An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special,' reads a quote from Japanese American modernist artist Ruth Asawa at the entry corridor to her first posthumous retrospective, on view through September 2 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Organized in 12 galleries that unfold in loose chronological progression over six decades, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective features over 300 works, including her signature hanging looped-wire sculptures, as well as lesser-known creations, like her 1940s paintings and drawings of flowers from the '90s and early 2000s. Asawa was born in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents and raised on a farm in Norwalk, California. As a teenager, she and her family were separated and displaced in 1942, unjustly relocated to incarceration camps as a result of the U.S. government's Executive Order 9066 during World War II. After the war ended, Asawa traveled to rural North Carolina and enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College (BMC), where from 1946 to 1949 she studied under teachers including Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Max Dehn. 'Each instructor was a practicing artist, dancer, musician, or mathematician, who understood his craft by doing it,' Asawa once said of her time at BMC. Inspired by dance classes Asawa took with Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College, the Dancers motif seen above (oil on paper, 1948-49) is one of several abstractions of dancing figures Asawa produced, highlighting her exploration of physical motion. The interlocking forms hint at her development of nesting and layering techniques in future sculptural work. Her diverse coursework in art and design—as well as mathematics and dance—inspired her early drawings, paintings, and wire work, but it was a foundational 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, that exposed Asawa to basket weaving with wire, a key inflection point that would critically influence the looped-wire technique that characterized her forthcoming sculptural work. The gallery encompassing Asawa's time at BMC showcases works dominated by bold colors and patterns, a reflection of her studies in color theory and her early experimentations with biomorphic forms that marked this period. It was also during this formative era that Asawa met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier. In one corner, a postmarked envelope from Lanier addressed to Asawa at 'B.M.C.' is displayed with the 1948 painting she made using the stamp colors. Read More Arche acoustic pod by Marouane Sadki for Leet Design In 1949, Asawa joined Lanier in San Francisco, and the city became their adopted hometown. It was there during the 1950s that Asawa honed her hanging looped-wire sculptures with her 'form within a form' nesting technique and interlocking lobes. In an expansive gallery dedicated to these abstract wire forms, sculptures of varying sizes hang individually and in groupings, creating shadows on the white gallery walls almost as intricate as the sculptures themselves. Asawa learned the pivotal looped-wire weaving technique approach that she would later apply to her hanging sculptures on a 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico. Asawa and Lanier had six children between 1950 and 1959, and the family moved to a cedar-shingled Arts and Crafts–style home in Noe Valley (where the couple lived for the rest of their lives). Although they renovated the home to incorporate a separate art studio, Asawa preferred to work in the living room—taking advantage of the double-height ceilings to suspend her wire sculptures from the rafters above. 'I've always had my studio in the house,' Asawa said, '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.' A gallery with wood-paneled walls—a departure from the white walls of the surrounding spaces—represents the Asawa-Lanier residence, with the size and scale of the space akin to their original Noe Valley living room. The exhibition includes the redwood doors formerly installed at the home's entrance, hand-carved in 1961 by Asawa and family members. Wire sculptures are suspended from the ceiling just as they were in Asawa's cathedral-like living room. Exhibition visitors are invited to pull up a chair and imagine the home as it looked as Asawa worked and raised her family there. Read More Can Video Games Improve Doctors' Decision-Making? One of the Ruth Asawa: Retrospective galleries evokes the living room of the Noe Valley home where Asawa and Lanier raised their six children in San Francisco—and from where Asawa often worked. Rough sketches of bananas and tomatoes—many of them on display in original spiral notebooks—and watercolor drawings of eggplants, cherries, chrysanthemums, and calla lilies reveal the artist's love of gardening and are also featured prominently in the Noe Valley gallery. Another gallery hones in on Asawa's focus on flowers from the 1980s into the early 2000s, with soft watercolors and black-and-white drawings of bouquets given to her by friends and family. Asawa, pictured in 1954, works on a large-scale sculpture. Elsewhere, through video, photographs, maquettes, and archival materials, the exhibition shines a light on Asawa's public artworks in the Bay Area from the 1960s onward, as well as her fierce advocacy for integrating art into San Francisco's public schools. 'It is especially meaningful to debut Asawa's first national and international retrospective in her adopted home city of San Francisco,' says Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family chief curator at SFMOMA, who co-curated the exhibition with Cara Manes of MoMA, New York (where the touring exhibition will head this fall). 'She left her mark all over the city in the form of her public works.' This early-1990s drawing of a bouquet from Anni Albers represents Asawa's continued exploration of flowers and the natural world. Walking through Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, room after room, shines a light on the rich variety of Asawa's oeuvre. 'Asawa was always making, always learning through doing,' says Bishop. 'By representing the full breadth and depth of her practice, we're hoping visitors will see for themselves how inventive she was across two and three dimensions, at a range of scales, and in a wide variety of materials.' Top image: Ruth Asawa and her granddaughter in front of her Japanese American Internment Memorial, 1990-94, commissioned by the City of San José; ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner; photo: Laurence Cuneo READ SOURCE
San Francisco Chronicle
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco lauds Ruth Asawa in stunning SFMOMA homecoming
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.'
San Francisco Chronicle
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
SFMOMA Art Bash 2025 featured Zack Fox, a ballroom battle and more
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art welcomed thousands of guests into its galleries on Wednesday, April 23, for its after hours Art Bash. The institution's biggest fundraiser kicked-off with a patron's dinner on the museum's seventh floor with an immersive event designed by New York artist Firelei Báez. It was followed by an auction, led by Sotheby's auctioneer Phyllis Kao, featuring works by Charles Gaines, Christina Quarles, Nicolas Party, Amy Sherald and Ruth Asawa. That latter's 'Ruth Asawa: Retrospective' is the latest exhibition to debut and will be on view at the museum through Sept. 2. Among the pop-up events, Berkeley artist Masako Miki created a one-night only art experience in the museum's White Box theater, while San Francisco artist Jeffrey Sincich took over the Steps coffee shop space for his project. Performances in the museum's main lobby included a headlining DJ set by comedian and rapper Zack Fox. San Francisco's own DJ Shortkut, who recently began performing again after recovering from a massive stroke, and DJ Lady Ryan also took to the turntables as part of Art Bash's musical lineup presented in part by the Stern Grove Festival. On the fifth floor at Cafe 5, Bay Area LGBTQ ballroom host Legendary Ryan "Christopher" Milan and commentator Icon Enyce Gorgeous Gucci paid tribute to the local queer ballroom scene with a recreation of a ballroom runway battle. Art Bash raises over $2 million annually for SFMOMA, with proceeds going toward its education and family programs and community engagement events that museum officials report benefit more than 150,000 people every year.
