The haptic intelligence of Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa’s head is lowered, examining the start of a new work in her hands. The artist sits on the floor with four of her six children, and in their midst are two of her signature looped-wire sculptures: mesh bodies suspended in the air, their surfaces swelling and contracting with organic ease. Asawa is immortalized in the photograph titled Ruth Asawa Family and Sculpture (1957), taken at home in the 1950s by her friend the photographer Imogen Cunningham.

Five years in the making and now opening this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective showcases how Asawa seamlessly wove art into her everyday life. The exhibition highlights more than 300 sculptures, drawings, paintings, prints and paperfolds made over her six-decade career.

‘One of the things that distinguishes this show is we’re looking at every medium Asawa worked in,’ says Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, who organised the exhibition with Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the retrospective will travel in Fall 2025. ‘We wanted to look at all aspects of Asawa’s practice, in which everything is interconnected.’

Home, the ‘epicentre’ of creativity

Asawa was born to a family of Japanese farmers in Norwalk, California. During World War II, she and her family were interned in incarceration camps for Japanese Americans, first at Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles and later in Rohwer, Arkansas. After briefly pursuing a career in education, she began studying art in 1946 at Black Mountain College with luminaries like Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective follows a loosely chronological structure. The room devoted to her Black Mountain days, for instance, contains two-dimensional works alongside her early baskets, such as Untitled (S.363, Freestanding Basket) (c. 1948). The gallery encompassing the 1960s features tied-wire sculptures like Untitled (S.451, Wall - Mounted Tied - Wire, Open - Center, Six - Branched Form Based on Nature) (c. 1965). One gallery, however, covers a broader expanse of time. It evokes the living room of the Noe Valley house, where she lived with her husband, Albert Lanier, from 1961 until her death at the age of 87.

Bishop notes that Asawa’s house was the ‘epicentre’ of her creative life: she worked from a home studio but only used that space for ‘messy things.’ She preferred to be in the living room, around people, including her children. ‘She would hang sculptures in the door jamb between the living room and the kitchen,’ says Bishop, ‘and work on them either standing or in the window seat.’

Haptic intelligence

Suspended looped-wire forms like Untitled, (S.046a-d, Hanging Group of Four, Two-Lobed Forms) (1961) are emblematic of Asawa’s sculptural language. Using a versatile material that was easy to put down and pick back up, she produced baskets, spheres, cones and trumpets. She also invented a unique, multilayered form that seemed to swallow itself, that in 1952 she termed the ‘continuous form within form’. In the exhibition’s catalogue, Manes writes that Asawa ‘remained committed to seeking a full range of permutations within a set of constraints, seeming to ask, How many ways can a sphere be interlocked, a lobe layered, two cones interpenetrated?’

Asawa possessed not only visual acuity but also haptic intelligence. ‘She believed in what you learned through using your hands,’ Bishop says. At home, she would give her children tactile tasks to perform, like looping wire around a dowel or moulding bread dough. To design the basin for San Francisco Fountain (1970–73) in Union Square, she invited more than 200 community members to mould images of San Francisco out of dough. The images, cast together in bronze, formed an intricately textured portrait of the city.

Remembering Asawa

Pictures of Asawa suggest how she may have been viewed by her friends, mentors, and fellow artists. In a 1948–49 collage by Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn, Asawa is shown dancing. In part of the collage, she wears a resolute expression; in another, she kicks her leg back in free-spirited abandon. In another of Cunningham’s photos, Asawa is dressed in black, reclining sensuously between her sculptures.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective gives audiences a chance to also consider Asawa amidst the artistic energies of the Bay Area, where she realized over a dozen public art commissions, served as a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, and helped develop an alternative high school now named the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.

Given the indelible mark Asawa left on the city, for Bishop, curating a posthumous retrospective of Asawa in San Francisco meant connecting with the artist’s innumerable friends, colleagues, and collaborators. ‘She was such a social and community-oriented person,’ says Bishop. ‘She touched so many people.’

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is on view at SFMOMA through 2 September 2025, with support provided by Christie’s. The exhibition will travel to MoMA New York, where it will run from 19 October 2025 – 2 February 2026.