Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work

Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work, Main Gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, United States, 2018. All artwork © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. Photograph © Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Alise O'Brien Photography

Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work, Main Gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, United States, 2018. All artwork © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. Photograph © Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Alise O'Brien Photography

Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work, Main Gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, United States, 2018. All artwork © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. Photograph © Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Alise O'Brien Photography

Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work, Main Gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, United States, 2018. All artwork © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. Photograph © Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Alise O'Brien Photography

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, United States

September 14, 2018–February 16, 2019

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation presented the first major museum exhibition of the work of Ruth Asawa since 2006, and the first ever outside the West Coast, where the artist lived and worked for six decades. This landmark career-spanning show brings together some eighty works, comprising nearly sixty sculptures from the full trajectory of her career—including looped wire, tied wire, electroplated, and cast works—as well as twenty drawings and collages, some of which date back to her years at Black Mountain College, where she studied with Josef Albers, who inspired her interest in materials as generators of form. Together, the works in the exhibition provided new insight into Asawa’s innovative contributions to the field of modern and contemporary sculpture.

Ruth Asawa: Life's Work was curated by Tamara H. Schenkenberg, Curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Learn more at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation.