The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently hosting its largest solo exhibition ever dedicated to a woman artist with "Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective," running through February 7, 2026. The comprehensive show, curated by Cara Manes and Janet Bishop alongside Dominkia Tylcz, Marin Sarvé-Tarr, and William Hernández Luege, presents over 300 objects that reveal the full scope of Asawa's artistic practice far beyond her celebrated wire sculptures.
Since Ruth Asawa's death in 2013, her graceful wire constructions have become synonymous with mid-century modern aesthetics. These biomorphic, semi-transparent sculptures typically hang from ceilings, casting delicate shadows while embodying an impossibly elegant form. Created by looping single strands of iron, galvanized steel, copper, or brass wire repeatedly, these openwork shells often contain dangling elements within, demonstrating remarkable three-dimensional thinking and meditative craftsmanship.
Asawa's recent surge in recognition stems from major exhibitions over the past decade at prestigious venues including the Pulitzer Foundation, Menil Foundation, Modern Art Oxford, Whitney Museum, and David Zwirner galleries worldwide. However, most of these shows focused primarily on her wire works, presenting a limited view of her artistic output. The current MoMA retrospective deliberately challenges this narrow perception by excluding the widely circulated portraits by Imogen Cunningham, which often showed Asawa veiled by her sculptures in an aloof, mysterious manner.
Instead, the exhibition features photographs by Elizabeth Jennerjahn and Hazel Larsen Archer, along with documentary footage showing Asawa at work. These images reveal a dramatically different artistic persona – playful, energetic, powerful, and deeply engaged with her community rather than removed from it. This shift in visual representation supports the show's central argument that Asawa was far from aloof, being instead joyfully enmeshed with her family, fellow artists, and San Francisco, where she spent most of her adult life.
The exhibition demonstrates that Asawa possessed what critic Aruna D'Souza describes as an "endless appetite for all manner of making." Her diverse body of work included drawings created with rubber stamps from laundry rooms, commercial textiles, origami-inspired three-dimensional wall coverings, bronze casts of baby feet and frogs, tender portraits of her children, a mermaid sculpture for Ghirardelli Square, and life masks of family and friends that adorned her house facade. She also designed an intricately detailed fountain proposal for San Francisco featuring local scenes, including protesters holding a "Jewish Diabetics for Peace" sign.
Asawa's artistic journey began amid profound personal trauma. She experienced Japanese American incarceration during World War II, first in California in 1942, then in Arkansas. After being released from an internment camp to train as a teacher, she was denied certification due to her race. This led her to Black Mountain College in 1946, where she studied under Josef and Anni Albers. Josef Albers particularly encouraged students to push their material and formal explorations to their limits, which for Asawa meant developing an attention to repetitive handwork, openness, transparency, and the creative potential of negative space.
A pivotal experience came in 1947 when Asawa traveled to Mexico to teach art. There, she learned basket-weaving techniques from Indigenous women, an encounter that directly inspired her later wire sculptures. Despite repeatedly injuring her hands while creating these works, Asawa found the physical pain preferable to the psychological wounds of societal intolerance. In a 1948 letter to her future husband Albert Lanier, she wrote: "We have all suffered intolerance innocently. I no longer want to nurse such wounds, I now want to wrap fingers cut by aluminum shavings, and hands scratched by wires; only these things produce tolerable pains."
The retrospective's layout thoughtfully traces Asawa's artistic evolution. Early galleries showcase projects from her Black Mountain College period, including responses to assignments from the Alberses and other faculty, commercial endeavors, and experimental woven wire pieces. A spectacular central gallery with stark white walls and bright lighting features more than a dozen hanging wire sculptures from her 1954-1958 solo exhibitions at New York's Peridot Gallery. These works evoke alien forms, underwater creatures, and martial imagery, with their repeated e-shaped loops resembling both chain mail and open-weave gauze.
Other exhibition spaces focus on Asawa's technical explorations, including her methods of bundling and wrapping wire, crocheting small-scale objects that gleam like jewels, her prints and drawings, and her significant contributions to arts education in San Francisco schools. However, the most revelatory section recreates the atmosphere of Asawa and Lanier's family home, demonstrating the inseparable relationship between her art and daily life.
This domestic-inspired gallery contains some of her most innovative hybrid works. Here, visitors can see wire sculptures incorporating stained glass created with help from her neighbor, artist Bruce Sherman, such as "Untitled (S. 163, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Open-Center, Six-Branched Spiral Form with Stained Glass)" from around 1976. Bronze casts made from wire sculptures appear both mounted and freestanding, resembling coral or barnacle-encrusted debris from the sea. Vibrant depictions of eggplants from around 1958 and watermelons from the 1960s abandon her typical graphic drawing style in favor of techniques like pressing painted paper onto surfaces, creating unexpected textures and patterns.
The exhibition also reveals Asawa's ventures into jewelry-making with clay beads, decorative ceramic tiles created with her husband, and a portrait bust of Imogen Cunningham from around 1953 crafted from looped iron wire with an inverted metal baking pan as its base. One of the most emotionally powerful pieces is an ink-on-paper work from around 1962-63 showing crosshatched lines representing a thick blanket weave, from which emerges the tender form of her newborn son Paul. The meandering curves carved into redwood doors for her house in 1961 echo drawings she made at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s.
This comprehensive presentation transforms how viewers understand Asawa's famous hanging wire sculptures. Rather than existing as isolated art objects, they appear as integral parts of a creative life fully integrated with family and community. As her daughter Aiko Cuneo explains: "We always saw her making art, it was part of her everyday existence. I never thought of her making art as a separate activity. To us, she wasn't working. We didn't have to be quiet so she could concentrate. Her artmaking space was always in our house." Cuneo notes that the children often helped with various projects, emphasizing the collaborative nature of much of Asawa's work.
The retrospective succeeds in presenting Asawa's creations as products of what the exhibition characterizes as the "sweet chaos of family and community" rather than pristine museum pieces removed from daily life. This approach feels more authentic to Asawa's intentions and provides insight into what she hoped her art would inspire in others. The show ultimately reveals an artist whose creative practice was as expansive and generous as it was technically masterful, challenging previous perceptions that focused primarily on the cool elegance of her wire sculptures while overlooking the warm humanity that drove her diverse artistic explorations.
