Shaping Air and Space: Ruth Asawa at SFMOMA
Like facing the still tableau of a vast aquarium, or flashing on a silent scene in a science fiction film starring elegant alien lifeforms, viewers entering “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are confronted with a series of striking, uncanny wire sculptures—half-familiar yet not wholly ungraspable. These sculptural creations, meticulously woven from brass, copper, iron and steel, have a friendly quality: curious, open, sympathetic. They embody a paradox, too, made, as they are, of mostly empty space—air itself—as much as the mesh contours that outline their porous borders but do not entirely contain them.
This expansive array of Asawa’s work begins its tour at SFMOMA before moving on to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain and the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland. The many wire sculptures, along with a wealth of Asawa’s drawings, paintings and lithographs and a wide range of associated artifacts, documentation and memorabilia, highlight her career-long creation of alternative possibilities for how we might imagine built structures and even life itself, inspired by and borrowing from the larger environment. Produced using disparate materials and multiple creative disciplines for impressively crafted feats of engineering, Asawa’s work nearly always also demonstrates connections to phenomena from the natural world, suggesting glimpses of some underlying matrix of organic infrastructure. Extending the sense of created space even further, hinting at alternate worlds beyond the immediate, perceivable physical realm, prominent shadow versions of each form play out on walls next to which most of the sculptures are suspended from the ceiling.
The wire sculptures range in size from just an inch or two in diameter to over ten feet in height. In a striking instance, the elongated Untitled (S.250, Hanging Seven-Lobed Continuous Interlocking Form with Spheres in the First, Fifth and Sixth Lobes)—one of her earlier pieces (circa 1955)—casts an overall aspect like an especially tall humanoid figure with a sort of extra-large eyeball-filled head. The woven iron and galvanized steel wire forms elegantly show signs of gravity’s pull in layered fashion, with its globular components overlapping and sometimes nestled inside others.
It is perhaps no surprise that Asawa’s most colorful works are painted, drawn and printed images taken most directly “from nature.” For example, 1975’s ink on paper Desert Flower, with its multiple hues of green stemming from a symmetrical brown branching center, suggests a realistic depiction of a real plant, though it is in actuality an abstract synthesis of how structures form when plants grow rather than representative of any specific flora. Many of Asawa’s wire works follow similar principles of invented abstract forms that suggest biomorphism without being directly drawn from life models.
Take, as another example, Untitled (S.731, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form with a Short Collar Forming a Partial Sixth Layer) from 1980, whose woven copper wire suggests a series of cellular chambers folded or contained within one another. Their many facets hint at plant leaves, recurring ovoid biospheres that suggest unusual, small animal iterations, and frozen, brief cascades or hat-like cones of woven metal whose drapes and folds recall those of jellyfish as well as large flower petals. A flaring skirt (the “short collar”) at the bottom of the hanging sculpture, meanwhile, gives the impression of both a base for the built structure and a creature frozen in mid-motion.
In a demonstration of how Asawa lived and worked, blurring the boundaries between inside and out, a gallery in the exhibition is devoted to a partial replica of her long-time living room in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood. The museum’s installation invites visitors to experience the spacious ambience of not only finished work by Asawa and others but also works in progress, cut flowers and other artifacts of lived life, nature and “culture.” Though Asawa had a separate, dedicated studio space (and adjacent outdoor garden), she had a stated preference for working on creative projects in the midst of the comings and goings of other people, starting with her family but also various other guests, including artists and designers working in many different media.
Asawa’s pursuit of alternatives to the built world is perhaps unsurprising. She came of age in the United States in an era in which her difference was highlighted by authorities who treated her unequally and much worse than the general population. She was incarcerated as part of a Japanese American family separated by government edict during World War II, thwarted in her pursuit of an education career because of her ethnicity, and prevented from marrying a non-Asian American by legal codes that prevailed in all but two states. Thus, one way to imagine Asawa’s creative drive is as a response to those suppressive representations of how humans perceive and respond to the world under their control.
The late 1940s and early 1950s, when Asawa was developing her creative sensibility, was a period during which artistic practices in the U.S. were dominated by the dynamic gestures of abstract expressionism and canvases fully covered in the washes of color-field painting, by moderne-style architecture (on the way to veering toward Brutalist materials and notions), and with heavy, solid-bodied figures sculpted in a range of materials by the likes of Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi. This period also featured the assertive introduction of painting overlapped with sculpture in the dense multimedia work of Robert Rauschenberg, a student with Asawa at Black Mountain College.
By contrast, designs for the sculptural forms that Asawa became best known for—along with most of her work in other media such as drawing and painting—were spare, precisely crafted and finely in touch with the materials she used, producing light, open volumes made of wire that created space out of next to nothing—again, air itself. Unlike Rauschenberg’s busy, dense accumulations—and even more minimal than Mid-Century Modern architecture’s aesthetic of “openness,” with its windows and courtyards surrounded by wood panels and poured concrete—Asawa’s modular forms created porous chambers that seem not only ready to house living creatures but to make up the fundamental outer layers of these creatures themselves. Further, Asawa’s commitment to “drawing” from nature provides a through line of inspiration less often discernible in the brainy and raucous demonstrations of modernist and pop awareness by most other prominent U.S. artists working at the time.
In Asawa’s later tied-wire work, the connection to nature seems especially strong, while the forms become even more intricate. For example, in Untitled (S.225, Wall-Mounted Tied-Wire, Open-Center, Six-Branched Form Based on Nature [1996]), the cross-hatched branches of a six-pointed star at the center give way to overlapping curvilinear arcing branches, which in their turn give way to finer, more loosely radiating filaments, suggesting both some deep structural basis for a plant-form and the multiplying neural pathways of mammalian ganglia.
Asawa channeled her ongoing creative output through complex multidisciplinary influences presented by a diverse group of mentors and peers as she energetically sought new input and technical possibilities from different materials and forms. One significant and somewhat surprising cross-disciplinary influence was Merce Cunningham, who formed his first dance company at Black Mountain College and helped crystallize in Asawa’s imagination an early visualization of bodies suspended and moving through space, which would manifest further in her later sculptures. This can be seen in the exquisite drawing Untitled (Dancers) in oils on paper (1948–49), in which a handful of darker shapes on a saturated yellow field suggest small cellular creatures inspired by Cunningham’s dancers.
Another notable early influence was Black Mountain artist faculty Anni Albers, with whom Asawa studied and who exposed Asawa to different approaches to textile work. While Albers generally worked with softer media than Asawa eventually embraced, much of the idea of transforming materials by working them together, over, under and through, became instilled in Asawa through her exposure to Albers’ practices and techniques.
This was furthered by Asawa’s contact with Anni’s husband, Josef Albers, a refugee from the famous Bauhaus school in the wake of German Nazification. Josef was also a significant influence in his capacity as founder and director of Black Mountain and as a teacher who emphasized artist-students’ focus on materials, form and perception. Asawa’s relationship with the Albers also led her to Mexico, where she first immersed herself intensively in her long-developing craft techniques in woven wire.
Complicating two-dimensional weaving, Asawa’s work with wire yielded fully rounded three-dimensional forms, recalling more idealized geometric elements, mostly ovoid, cylindrical or conical. The supple curves, cascading layers and forms-within-forms in Asawa’s work all contribute to a greater sense of the sculptures as something living, not simply as containers. In this sense, her sculptures blur the ideas of architecture as built structures created to draw borders between “inside” and “outside,” as well as distinguish “living creature” and “built form” as separate entities. Asawa’s use of brass, copper, iron and steel in various singular or multiple sourcings defaulted to a limited palette of mostly black or muted browns, imbuing them with a greater sense of “builtness” in the mode of prototypes with coloration unusual to find in unrefined materials from nature.
That architecture was also a substantial concern is apparent in Asawa’s three-dimensional sculptures and public art. One early influence was Buckminster Fuller, who, as a member of the faculty at Black Mountain College, erected the first of the geodesic dome constructions he became famous for during the time Asawa was a student there (she later also collaborated with Fuller). Asawa’s husband, Albert Lanier, was also an architect. Which is not to say that every architect loved Asawa’s work. Lawrence Halprin, for instance, complained about the thickness, busy-ness and lowest-common-aesthetic-denominator of Andrea, the fountain featuring mermaids, turtles and frogs that Asawa designed and had cast in bronze for San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square in 1968. (The real-life model for the mermaids was Asawa’s friend and namesake for the title of the piece itself.)
Another experiment in representing a person more literally (a practice that was arguably less significant among her larger output) is Asawa’s rare attempt at human depiction in the awkward and not very distinguished Portrait of Imogen Cunningham (1953) in iron wire with a baking pan base. Asawa also made a series of life masks of friends and family, which generate an eerie sort of absence/presence when presented simultaneously as a group.
Asawa generated more interesting portraiture with the lithographs she produced with black and white images of her daughter and father—Aoki and Umakichi (both 1965). The former is an eerie, ghost-like grey silhouette with a kerchief partially covering the subject’s head. The latter is made especially complex with a whorled pattern—as if layered with passing clouds or some aura perceivable only in ultraviolet or infrared—overlaying dimly limned facial features.
Though these forays into portraiture are engaging and worthwhile takes on how humans might be represented, ultimately it is Asawa’s imaginative sculptural perspectives proposing overlap between built structures and life itself—and how representations of both might take from a greater natural environment—that prove most indelible and striking.
“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 2, 2025.