SFMOMA, San Francisco
April 2025-January 2027
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announces Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, the first major national and international museum retrospective of the groundbreaking work of Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). Premiering at SFMOMA from April 5 through September 2, 2025, this will be the first posthumous retrospective to feature the entire spectrum of the artist’s awe-inspiring practice. Sculpture, drawings, prints, paintings, design objects, and archival material from U.S.-based public and private collections will offer an in-depth look at her expansive output and its inspirations, exploring the ways her longtime San Francisco home and garden served as the epicenter of her creative universe, and highlighting the ethos of collaboration and inclusivity that informed her numerous public sculpture commissions and unwavering dedication to arts advocacy.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective will feature more than 300 works spanning six decades of the artist’s career, engaging in the full range of materials and techniques that Asawa employed. Her signature looped-wire sculptures will share gallery space with lesser-known works in other mediums that supply valuable insight into the interconnectedness and relentlessly experimental nature of her artistic vision.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between SFMOMA and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and co-curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA with invaluable support from Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.
Following its presentation at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to The Museum of Modern Art, New York from October 19, 2025 to February 7, 2026 and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain from March 22 to September 26, 2026, ending at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland from October 25, 2026 to January 24, 2027. The tour will coincide with what would have been Asawa’s 100th birthday on January 24, 2026.
American artist, educator, and arts advocate Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Born in rural California, Asawa first studied under professional artists while her family and other people of Japanese descent were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an incarceration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, sixteen months later, she enrolled in 1943 in Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment.
Upon moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa, a firm believer in the radical potential of arts education from her time at Black Mountain College, devoted herself to expanding access to art-focused educational programs. She co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in 1968 and was instrumental in the creation of the first public arts high school in San Francisco in 1982, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010. Additionally, Asawa served on the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Asawa was awarded a 2022 National Medal of Arts by President Joe Biden in 2024, only the second visual artist to receive this high honor posthumously.
