What a gift to the soul to see the beautiful retrospective of Ruth Asawa’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I’ve been a fan of her work for years. The first experience was seeing one of her hanging looped sculptures at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The shadows on the wall were fully a part of the work; dimensional drawing in space.

“An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”
– Ruth Asawa

In this retrospective of 300+ works, Ruth’s specialness shines through. Patterns emerge, go dormant, then rise again, often in another media. Swirls, spikes, loops, and lines dance together across 50 years of making. It’s astounding to see such exuberance unfold across a lifetime.

“You can’t force a plant to bloom. It has a cycle. You have to tend it and care for it and wait for the bloom to happen. If you don’t take care of it, it dies. The more experiences you have like this, the more you begin to understand your own cycle.“
– Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa’s cycles include personal art, commercial art, public art, founding a school, growing a garden, making prints, battling discrimination, surviving the disgraceful Japanese interment camps, raising 6 children, and making art every day.

Her cyclical blooming yielded different kinds of blossoms, but always true to the original plant. Distinct motifs weave their way in and out of her work. Forms start early at Black Mountain College in small color study paintings and resurface again 20 years later as large-scale tied-wire branching trees. Sometimes looking at a work from a different angle reveals unexpected similarities.

It was amazing to visit the exhibit (4 times!) with a trusty sketchbook in hand.

Sketching from a museum exhibit can be tricky, because I don’t want to block the art, and the Asawa show was quite busy with people. Only dry media like pencil is allowed, so no watercolor (tho I often add a wash of color once out of the galleries, which is a lovely way to reflect and deepen the memories.)

The first visit was purely to experience the work.

The second visit, I was able to see more fully by making sketches.

The third visit meant deepening my attention to specific works and the forms that she often created.

The fourth visit (later in the same day as the third so I could see it with other friends) was about getting messy and having fun.

The roughness of the resulting sketches is part of the joy. Sketching in a museum is about seeing with a pencil, not rendering an illustration for display. Making museum sketches allowed Ruth’s work to become embedded in my worldview and has already inspired me to work with new materials in new ways.

Thank you, Ruth!

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:: About Ruth Asawa ::

“Ruth Aiko Asawa (Japanese, January 24, 1926 – August 5, 2013) was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of works on paper, including abstract and figurative drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.” – Wikipedia

Learn more about her and her work: ruthasawa.com

:: About the Exhibition ::

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective at the SF MOMA, April 5–September 2, 2025

“This first posthumous retrospective presents the full range of Ruth Asawa’s work and its inspirations over six decades of her career. As an artist, Asawa forged a groundbreaking practice through her ceaseless exploration of materials and forms. As an educator and civic leader, Asawa’s impact on San Francisco can still be felt today.” – SFMOMA.org