Ruth Asawa at SFMoMA

Started: 2025-09-24 21:30:04

Submitted: 2025-09-24 22:25:13

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A career retrospective

At the end of July, at the end of a month when I was just beginning to see the light at the end of the chip bringup tunnel, I went to see the Ruth Asawa career retrospective at SFMoMA.

Ruth Asawa is known as a San Francisco artist, but I didn't fully appreciate her body of work until I saw several of her pieces at LACMA when I visited in early 2019. After seeing her work at LACMA I remembered that the de Young Museum has several of her hanging wire sculptures tucked away from the main body of the museum in the elevator lobby for the observation deck at the top of their tower above the museum looking out over Golden Gate Park; and that I've seen her work at various places around the city, including a fountain in front of a Google building on the Embarcadero.

This was a career retrospective so the exhibition started with some of her early work as a student, including a couple of tessellated drawings that foreshadowed her wire sculptures (and also looked like some drawings I have in a notebook somewhere). The displays talked about her history as a Japanese-American incarcerated because of her family origin during the Second World War, and her studies as an art student. There were a few examples of her early commercial art, including more tessellated patterns, and some interesting works made out of folded paper that were hard to describe but were visually interesting.

Ruth Asawa sculptures at SFMOMA

Then the exhibit transitioned into the work that she's best known for, her elaborate hanging wire sculptures. From a distance they're . In these pictures it's hard to get a proper sense of scale; the ceilings in the galleries were probably 12 feet tall so the tallest of these works are nine or ten feet. Each one is designed to hang from a single point, and the sculpture looks like it's made out of a single strand of wire looped back on itself in what I can only describe as a sort of crochet pattern.

Ruth Asawa wire sculptures at SFMOMA

The crocheted wire forms a mesh that, in many of the works, enclose a volume while exposing the interior in a way that made me think of wire-form 3D computer art in the 1990s. Each loop of wire expands or contracts the volume, creating the appearance of a smooth curved surface. It looks effortless and obvious but in a way that I'm sure it was neither.

Ruth Asawa sculptures

Some of the sculptures form a single surface that is folded into itself multiple times, creating a deeply-nested shape that still manages to have a clear inside and outside.

Ruth Asawa sculpture

Other works let the surfaces intersect each other, terminating at jagged edges where the tiny loops of wire are more obvious. Some pieces let multiple surfaces weave in and out of each other. These reminded me of the computer graphics I was doing in the 1990s, building designs using stretched and distorted primitive shapes, and boolean operations to create intersections and differences and unions of these primitives.

Ruth Asawa hanging wire sculptures

There were dozens of similar sculptures in the galleries, each just distinct enough that I stood, transfixed, by each of them as I saw them.

Ruth Asawa wire sculpture

The rest of the exhibition showed other works from Ruth Asawa's career: a fountain at Ghirardelli Square, studies for the fountain that's now in front of a Google building on the Embarcadero. There was a display case full of tiny hanging wire sculptures, built on the same principles as the ones I'd seen in the galleries, but built on a scale of inches not feet. One room showed details from a memorial to Japanese internment that she built in San Jose. There was the front door to her house in Noe Valley, carved out of redwood and looking like a piece of art. Finally there was a large-scale picture of her Noe Valley living room, towering above the gallery like the original's cathedral ceiling.

The whole experience was amazing and I was excited to see it all in one place.

SFMOMA at Yerba Buena