Ruth Asawa teaching a Baker's Clay workshop at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), 1973; photo courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (March 5, 2025)–The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) today announced a $1.5 million grant from Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, in support of 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 first posthumous retrospective will feature the entire spectrum of the artist’s awe-inspiring practice.
The grant is the largest corporate grant for a single exhibition in SFMOMA’s history. It will provide critical funding to support community-building and audience initiatives around the exhibition, as well as bolster the revitalization of downtown, reestablishing it as a thriving cultural destination and beacon within San Francisco’s rich arts ecology, which Asawa deeply valued.
Including sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings and archival material from U.S.-based public and private collections, the exhibition will offer an in-depth look at Asawa’s expansive output and its inspirations.
It will also explore the ways her longtime San Francisco home and garden served as the epicenter of her creative universe and will highlight the ethos of collaboration and inclusivity that informed her numerous public sculpture commissions and unwavering dedication to arts advocacy.
“We are grateful to Google.org for their generous support of Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “This extraordinary funding will enable SFMOMA to enhance its public programs, community partnerships and free access initiatives in celebration of a legendary artist who continues to have an indelible positive impact on San Francisco.”
“Google.org is proud to support SFMOMA's Ruth Asawa retrospective and the incredible community engagement initiatives it will make possible. This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to explore Asawa's legacy as an artist and advocate, while also inspiring the next generation of local creative thinkers and community leaders," said Adrian Schurr, Senior Giving Manager, Google.org.
With Google.org’s exceptional support, SFMOMA will offer the following wide range of programs, events and free-access opportunities in celebration of Ruth Asawa’s life, career and dedication to her community.
FREE COMMUNITY DAY
Designed in collaboration with local arts nonprofit Ruth’s Table and incorporating the museum’s regular Second Sundays program that offers activities for families, SFMOMA will offer free admission on April 13. Marking the opening of Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, this community celebration will bring together performers and creators across disciplines and generations.
FREE FIRST THURSDAYS
SFMOMA will enhance offerings during its ongoing First Thursdays program, which provides free admission to residents of the nine Bay Area counties on the first Thursday of each month. By partnering with other organizations and initiatives aimed at revitalizing San Francisco’s downtown district, SFMOMA will bolster collective efforts to reestablish the neighborhood as a thriving cultural center.
BEYOND CONFLICT SYMPOSIUM
A two-day symposium and complimentary public program will be designed in partnership with the global organization Beyond Conflict and California College of the Arts (CCA) for a cross-section of Bay Area arts and civic leaders.
Aimed to foster connections around shared issues, the symposium will help cultivate cross-disciplinary understanding and promote creative thinking around civic revitalization and civic action. For 30 years, Beyond Conflict has facilitated reconciliation, progress and peace in over 75 countries including South Africa, Northern Ireland and Cuba.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Drawn Together
Designed in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, this dynamic program series—four events in total, offered monthly—will reflect on radical creativity as a tool for change. Each program will be interdisciplinary and include partners who bring forward connections and shared approaches across different areas of work, including art, science, law, social justice, urban design and more.
ONGOING SFMOMA PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT ACTIVITIES
Community Garden
On SFMOMA’s Floor 4 terrace, adjacent to the exhibition galleries, a community garden will be cultivated throughout the presentation of Ruth Asawa: Retrospective. The garden will showcase Asawa’s commitment to gardening as an educational tool and a way to contribute to sustainable urban environments. Featuring local native plants, including those that grew in Asawa’s own home garden, the Floor 4 terrace will be activated with ongoing programing.
Storytelling Booth
SFMOMA will host an on-site storytelling booth within the Asawa exhibition galleries that shares recordings and collects visitors’ stories about the ways that Asawa has inspired their own lives and artistic practices. A companion feature on SFMOMA’s website will create a visual map of where the stories occurred to demonstrate Asawa’s impact within the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Living Legacy: Materials Lab
SFMOMA’s free-to-access Koret Education Center on Floor 2 will be transformed into an art making and materials lab for sharing the ongoing work of organizations to which Asawa was deeply connected. The space will have ongoing workshops for all ages, encouraging engagement in art making processes rooted in collaboration, sustainable materials and social action. In June, workshops will be presented in collaboration with the local nonprofit SCRAP; in July and August, workshops with be designed with additional partners.
MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Ruth Asawa was born in Norwalk, California, in 1926 and raised on a farm. In 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were separated and unjustly displaced to incarceration camps, along with over 100,000 other people of Japanese descent, in the wake of Executive Order 9066.
After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. The opening gallery of the exhibition will highlight her highly generative studies at the college from 1946 to 1949.
With the encouragement of Black Mountain College teachers including Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Max Dehn, Asawa flourished, creating drawings with undulating lines, repeating patterns and studies of positive and negative space that would resonate in later work. This gallery also features Asawa’s 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, during which she learned a looped-wire technique used for basketry that would prove fundamental to her sculptural practice of the following decade and beyond.
In 1949, Asawa moved from North Carolina to San Francisco—the city she would call home for the rest of her life—and exhibited at SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) for the first time.
A gallery devoted to the 1950s in San Francisco will reveal a decade of tremendous productivity, when she exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. This period included the development of the artist’s signature innovation: hanging looped-wire sculptures with forms within forms and interlocking lobes. An adjacent gallery will include Asawa’s designs for commercial projects, including fabric patterns and wallpaper.
In 1962, Asawa received the gift of a desert plant that inspired her next major body of work: tied-wire sculptures, some wall-mounted, some suspended and some freestanding. A gallery focused on nature will examine the artist’s deep affinity with the organic world and its relationship to her practice in both two and three dimensions.
In a shift in register from the unfolding of Asawa’s artistic innovations across time, the exhibition will feature a gallery evoking the Noe Valley home and studio that was the hub of the artist’s creative and family life for more than half a century, from the early 1960s until her passing in 2013.
This section will reconvene a grouping of wire sculptures of various forms and sizes that are known to have hung from the rafters in her living room, as well as a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and examples of her material experiments in clay, copper, electroplating and bronze.
Highlights of the space will be Asawa’s original hand-carved redwood doors from the house and works she displayed by other artists, including Josef Albers, Ray Johnson, Peggy Tolk-Watkins and Marguerite Wildenhain.
Another display spanning several decades will feature the artist’s miniatures: a dozen of her tiniest wire sculptures—the smallest measuring just over one inch in diameter—that will be installed in a case that invites close looking.
The continued inspiration of the artist’s garden will be revealed in a final gallery featuring a stunning array of Asawa’s late drawings of plants, bouquets and flowers produced during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Throughout the retrospective, Asawa’s contemporaneous arts advocacy and public sculpture practice from the 1960s forward will be highlighted. Video, photographs, maquettes and archival materials will illuminate Asawa’s fountains at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square (Andrea, 1968); Union Square (San Francisco Fountain, 1973); and Bayside Plaza, Embarcadero (Aurora, 1986); as well as projects connected to Japanese American incarceration in San Jose (Japanese American Internment Memorial, 1990–94) and at San Francisco State University (Garden of Remembrance, 2000-02).
EXHIBITION VENUES + DATES
SFMOMA: April 5–September 2, 2025
MoMA, NY: October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026
Guggenheim Bilbao: March 20–September 13, 2026
Fondation Beyeler: October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027
EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA).
The exhibition is 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 Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Assistant Curator, and William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; and Dominika Tylcz, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
CATALOGUE
An extensively illustrated 336-page catalogue published by SFMOMA in association with Yale University Press will accompany the exhibition. Texts on key aspects of Asawa’s art and creative practice contextualize this visual survey.
Lead essayists include Anne Anlin Cheng, Janet Bishop, Cara Manes, and Jennie Yoon and Marci Kwon. Additional contributors include Genji Amino, Isabel Bird, Caitlin Haskell, Charlotte Healy, Corey Keller, Ruth Ozeki, Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Jeffrey Saletnik and Dominika Tylcz.
SUPPORT
With support from Google.org.
Major support for the exhibition and catalogue is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, lead support is provided by Randi and Bob Fisher, the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, Diana Nelson and John Atwater, and Helen and Charles Schwab.
Presenting support is provided by Dana and Bob Emery. Major support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Christie's, Davidow Family Fund for Exhibitions of Modern Art, The KHR McNeely Family Foundation, Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, Katie and Matt Paige, and Shelagh Rohlen, in memory of Tom Rohlen.
Significant support is provided by the Neal Benezra Exhibition Fund, The Black Dog Private Foundation, Jim Breyer, Susan Karp and Paul Haahr, Maria Manetti Shrem and Jan Shrem, The Elaine McKeon Endowed Exhibition Fund, Kate and Wes Mitchell, Jessica Moment, Deborah and Kenneth Novack, the Bernard and Barbro Osher Exhibition Fund, Nancy and Alan Schatzberg, Lydia Shorenstein, and David Zwirner.
Meaningful support is provided by Shawn and Brook Byers, the Mary Jane Elmore West Coast Exhibition Fund, Jessica and Matt Farron, Hellman & Friedman LLC, Maryellen and Frank Herringer, Keiko Sakamoto and Bill Witte, Rummi and Arun Sarin Painting and Sculpture Fund, Roselyne Chroman Swig, Diane B. Wilsey, Pat Wilson, and Sonya Yu.
The Asawa family home and garden presentation at SFMOMA is made possible by Susan Karp and Paul Haahr. Major support for the catalogue is provided by Denise Littlefield Sobel. Meaningful support for the catalogue is provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States and a thriving cultural center for the Bay Area. Our remarkable collection of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design and media arts is housed in a LEED Gold-certified building designed by the global architects Snøhetta and Mario Botta. In addition to our seven gallery floors, SFMOMA currently offers over 47,000 square feet of free, art-filled public space open to all.
Visit sfmoma.org or call 415.357.4000 for more information.
