This post was originally published on artnews.com
In 1973, during the opening of her first San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Ruth Asawa held what she called a “dough-in,” a communal experience that was part baking, part art, and part fun. Asawa’s recipe for a batch of baker’s clay, a white nonedible substance, went something like this: measure out 4 cups of flour and 1 cup of salt, then combine it with 1½ cups of water and hand it over to a group of kids to do the mixing. Some 1,000 parents and children took part, popping their creations into an oven in the café downstairs.
That “dough-in” sounds to me like a grand old time. But back in 1973, some onlookers were dubious: did cooking with toddlers really count as art? Asawa, who had by then been used baker’s clay in her own art (and brought on her six children as her collaborators), seemed to care none for that question. “People agree that even an artist’s sketchy drawings on flimsy paper can be permanent,” she wrote in her 1971 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of four failed attempts to get such a grant. “So can dough.”
Accordingly, she added the “dough-in” clay to her SFMOMA show, placing the baked squares alongside her own beloved wire sculptures and drawings.
Now it is 2025, and Asawa’s art occupies SFMOMA’s galleries once more in another retrospective, this one even bigger than the last. Her reputation has undergone a sea change in 52-year interval between her SFMOMA shows. Following her death in 2013, her estate joined David Zwirner, one of the biggest galleries in the world, and her wire sculptures started selling for top dollar at auction, with one going for over $5 million in 2020. (An A-list celebrity was even accused of having fake Asawas in her home not long afterward.) Two years later, Asawa made her posthumous debut at the Venice Biennale, that juggernaut of the international art world.
As her art has gone worldwide, Asawa’s work has come to seem more austere than it really is. (The SFMOMA show is going cross-continental, too, appearing next at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this fall before heading in 2026 to the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland.) Her beautiful sculptures of the 1950s, made from interlocking loops of brass and wire arranged to form sinuous lobes, have started to appear cold, and she has frequently been claimed as a Black Mountain College artist, aligning her with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and others whose work is associated with an involute brand of conceptualism.
SFMOMA’s current retrospective presents a different version of Asawa. This deeply enriching show proposes her as an artist whose work doubled as both an intellectual inquiry and a form of amusement. Her sculptures and drawings acted as the tools of play, the show suggests, and all that play became her way of understanding her uncertain place in the world. Admirably, in doing so, the exhibition commits an institutional sin: it implies that the art on view is fun.
The show, organized with passion by SFMOMA’s Janet Bishop and MoMA’s Cara Manes, with Marin Sarvé-Tarr, William Hernández Luege, and Dominika Tylcz, does not make Asawa’s art seem like a frivolous endeavor. There are plenty of Asawa’s tied-wire sculptures of the ’60s, hung so that you can gaze at these rhizomatic structures and wonder how she twisted together thousands of individual elements for some of them, creating endless shapes previously unknown. There are also lots of careful studies made in preparation for public artworks throughout the Bay Area, and there are also many intricate drawings, including one jaw-dropper, made ca. 1962, that depicts her son Paul Lanier lying on a blanket, his body made of teeny-tiny ink marks that gently warp.
But the exhibition also features many pieces that seem designed by Asawa to entertain herself: casts of visitors to her home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood, some of whom did not know in advance that they’d have plaster smeared on their faces upon arrival; trembly sketches of bouquets whose outlines she rendered with a hand that shook because she had lupus. Everything around her was fodder for her work. Her life was her art.
Aptly, the SFMOMA show’s centerpiece is a gallery devoted to her house, whose living room the curators have reconstructed. Wire sculptures that once dangled above Asawa’s crawling babies are now suspended from the museum’s ceiling; works by friends collected by Asawa are now assembled in simulacra of the very cabinets in which she kept these objects.
In a nearby gallery, there are also her residence’s doors. Formed from two nine-foot-tall planks of redwood, these doors have curlicuing waves whose crests were hammered in using mallets and chisels. Asawa created the doors with her children. When opened, they revealed a space that served as both a home and a studio to its matriarch, who always found comfort there—even when the rest of the world was less hospitable.
Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, to Japanese immigrants who bore witness to a swell of racism following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. That year, Asawa’s father dug a hole in the ground and buried in it various signifiers of the family’s Japanese identity: dolls, tea ceremony paraphernalia, and more. It mattered little. The next year, the FBI arrested Asawa’s father—she wasn’t reunited with him until after the end of World War II—and she and the rest of her family were interned along with other Japanese Americans first in the stables of the Santa Anita racetrack and later in Arkansas. She gained an interest in art during this time, learning to draw from incarcerated artists who’d worked on films for Disney.
Another artist would have utilized these traumatic experiences as the seeds for an explicitly protest-minded practice. Not so for Asawa, whose 1990–94 public commission Japanese American Internment Memorial, still on view today in San José, is one of the few works she ever made that explicitly tackled her incarceration. (One heartbreaking image of a family tossing out its belongings seems to echo her father’s burial of his own things.) Asawa said being incarcerated had remade her as a person. In an achingly sad letter written to her future husband, the architect Albert Lanier, in 1948, she noted that her imprisonment had “forced” her to become a “citizen of the universe.” She expressed a desire to “wrap fingers cut by aluminum shavings, and hands scratched by wires.” The letter put into words what it would take her almost half a century to put into her art.
But before the wire sculptures, there were a range of abstract paintings and drawings made at Black Mountain College, an art school in Asheville, North Carolina, that became a hotbed of avant-garde tinkering during the postwar era. Asawa headed there on the recommendation of a close friend’s sister and emerged an experimental artist, trained under the tutelage of Josef Albers.
Whereas her mentor’s paintings of concentric squares are prized for their meticulousness, Asawa’s work was much freer. One memorable work in the SFMOMA, made while Asawa was on laundry duty at Black Mountain in either 1948 or 1949, features circular forms made by repeatedly pressing a stamp reading “BMC” to paper. The resulting forms look a bit like planets turning on their axis, spinning on in a solar system all their own.
Asawa had now fully come into her own as a citizen of the universe, and would only continue broadening her cosmos with her wire sculptures, which she made using basket weaving techniques she’d observed during her travels in Mexico. Some of these sculptures continue the celestial theme, with orbs set inside one another, forming worlds within worlds. They are transparent—you can see through their web of loops to get a good look inside—while also remaining slinky and cryptic. Adding to their mystique is their unusual appearance: they look firm when suspended, even though they are in fact loose and slack when brought down to earth, as evidenced by a photograph of one curled-up sculpture shot by Imogen Cunningham, a friend of Asawa’s.
Contrary to their carefully crafted appearance, the wire sculptures weren’t plotted out in advance by Asawa. I have a feeling that, for her, making them was like enacting a game of what-if. What if there was a planet that was totally see-through, that appeared alien and familiar all the same? What if wire, the very material used to imprison her and roughly 120,000 other Japanese Americans, could be a means of liberation? What if art was a way to understand the world anew?
That would explain why Asawa’s many subjects over the next few decades, in prints, sculptures, drawings, and more, included so many disparate things—her children, pigeons on a city street, hydrangeas—and why she thought it appropriate to take on a number of public art projects that existed beyond art galleries. SFMOMA’s retrospective is accompanied by a nice online map of those pieces, which make a strong case for seeing this show now in San Francisco, instead of at other points in its tour.
SFMOMA’s show therefore cannot encompass all of her art. This massive, 350-work show peaks somewhere in the middle, right around an interlude in which viewers are briefly moved outdoors, to a deck where they can see a reconstruction of Asawa’s garden. Its brilliance dims in its second half, when it gets into Asawa’s public art. But that is a feature, not a bug, since Asawa did not seem to valorize white-cube spaces like these galleries. She wanted her viewers to go out into the world, to explore their surroundings using her art as a guide and become better citizens of the universe.
To that end, I recommend a trip to her 1975–76 Origami Fountains upon completing an SFMOMA visit. They’re set within an unassuming Japantown square, and they feature water dripping across steel forms resembling folded-paper flowers. (Those blooms are meant to recall the paper-folding exercises Asawa and other Black Mountain College students were often assigned.) You can stand before the fountains, admiring them as one might an artwork in a museum, or you can use them as seating while munching on some noodles, as I witnessed others doing this past April. I also observed children running around Asawa’s angular petals, chasing after one another. The kids seemed to have the right idea.