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Communing With Ruth Asawa

A retrospective of the California artist’s work emphasizes her sense that art should not be frozen in time in a gallery but belongs in the world, at home and in public.

Even the simplest doorway can be rich with symbolism, suggesting transition, possibility, decision, or revelation. Take the entrance to Ruth Asawa’s home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley: Visitors were first greeted with hundreds of “Life Masks,” clay castings of her loved ones installed on the cedar exterior adjacent to the doorway. Then there was the door itself: Across two panels of imposing, nine-foot slabs of redwood, the artist drew a pattern of meandering, interlocking waves, which were then hand-carved by Asawa and her children. A dinky knob would be undignified for such a remarkable door; hers required someone to slip their hand into a hollowed-out burl. Inside, their fingers would find indentations to push and pull the door, an invitation into a world of awe.

This winter, Asawa’s door was far from home, on view at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art as part of “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective,” the artist’s first posthumous survey following her death in 2013. The show launched in April 2025 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; for both museums, it’s the largest exhibition ever dedicated to a woman artist. (The show will travel to Spain and Switzerland next.)

Asawa is best known for her hanging wire sculptures, and there are many permutations of these voluminous lobes spread throughout “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective.” Some are elongated and appear almost perfectly symmetrical, while others clump together like molecules. They resemble pantyhose stuffed with socks, or a stack of witches’ hats, or a squid mid-squiggle. Smaller forms are enveloped in larger ones, the whole thing semitransparent and as weightless as an insect’s wing. The effect is confounding—“How did that even get in there?”—which is to say, mesmerizing. In photos of Asawa’s home, these sculptures are shown dangling from the wooden rafters of a vaulted ceiling. Imagine stepping through that redwood threshold on a sunny afternoon, as the golden light casts curlicue shadows on the walls: It must have felt like standing beneath the clouds of a steel sky. The display was more formal at MoMA, but the stark galleries offered opportunities to witness how the hanging pieces respond to their environment, swaying almost imperceptibly from breath and step.

Asawa believed that her efforts at home and in the neighborhood were as important as the pieces by her displayed in highfalutin museums. “My need to be an artist does not exceed my desire to be a parent, and also part of a community,” she wrote. “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” honors the artist by taking those ambitions seriously.

Asawa was not yet widely known outside the Bay Area when she died at age 87. Her “rediscovery” began in 2008, after a woman named Addie Lanier contacted Jonathan Laib, then a senior specialist of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. Lanier was hoping to sell a work by the late painter and color theorist Josef Albers, which he’d given as a gift to her mother, Ruth, a sculptor who’d studied with Albers at Black Mountain College. Ruth was now ill with lupus, and her family needed to raise money for her healthcare. (The eventual sale of the Albers brought in over $100,000.)

Laib hadn’t heard of Ruth Asawa (or “Ruthie,” per Albers’s inscription) before. In 2010, after seeing photos of her sculptures, Laib flew to San Francisco and met with her. He told her of his plans to get her art in front of more people, beginning with her first New York City exhibition in over 50 years. Though Asawa was bedridden and weakened by lupus, Laib recalled, she “could nod, and spoke with her smile.”

Laib felt that the artist had been miscategorized. “I knew her work didn’t belong in the design sale category,” he told Asawa’s biographer, Marilyn Chase. “Once placed along Louise Bourgeois, Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, I knew people would see she stood right there in the postwar contemporary world.” Laib presented one of Asawa’s hanging sculptures in a 2010 auction, and his instincts were proved correct when it surpassed her previous sale record by 500 percent. In 2013, months before Asawa died, an 11-foot-tall piece from the late 1960s sold for $1.4 million. In Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, Chase details how two of Asawa’s daughters shared the news of the record-breaking sale, whispering in her ear: “Mama, you’re playing with the big boys now!”

As of 2020, Asawa’s auction record stands at $5.3 million. Despite Laib’s incredible success in elevating her to art-world superstardom, he himself admitted that Asawa’s “own commercial work was never at the top of her list.” Yet the concerns that were—namely her family and community—haven’t always been in the forefront of Asawa’s public positioning and reception. In a 2015 essay for the Journal of Modern Craft, Sarah Archer examined Asawa’s market appraisal and noted that the auction materials tended to sidestep Asawa’s commissions and teaching career, as if the connection would undermine her growing stature in the art world. As Archer writes, “Rather than simple obscurity, what Asawa may have had by the end of her life instead was the wrong kind of renown, at least in the view of contemporary art circles (then, as now).”

It’s curious to consider what Asawa would think of this turn of events; she would likely not be surprised that her career was difficult to categorize. She was born in 1926 to Japanese parents in Norwalk, California, now a part of the greater Los Angeles area. She was the fourth of seven children,........

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