This month, the San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork (SFMOMA) obtained the most important company donation it’s ever gotten for a single exhibition.
SFMOMA introduced on March 5 that it might host the primary main posthumous retrospective of works by artist, activist, and educator Ruth Asawa, who died in 2013, backed by $1.5 million in funding from Google’s philanthropy offshoot, Google.org. The exhibition will open on April 5 with 300 works spanning Asawa’s six-decade profession, curated by SFMOMA Chief Curator Janet Bishop and New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) Assistant Curator Cara Manes.
“Not only was Asawa an exceptionally talented artist — among the most distinguished sculptors of the 20th century and a major contributor in so many other mediums — but she lived her values in everything she did, modeling the importance of the arts and opening up creative opportunities for others at every turn,” Bishop mentioned in an October press launch.
The exhibition will stay on show at SFMOMA till September, after which it can journey to MoMA, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Switzerland’s Fondation Beyele via January 2027.
Ruth Asawa (second from left) with guests to her exhibition Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View at SFMOMA in 1973 (photograph by Laurence Cuneo, courtesy SFMOMA)
Asawa, identified for her biomorphic suspended wire sculptures, was born in 1926 and detained alongside her mom and siblings in 1942 in a focus camp for Japanese Individuals at a horse race monitor in Santa Anita, California. The artist and her household have been then moved to a camp in Arkansas, the place she graduated highschool. Asawa rose to prominence as a sculptor within the late Fifties with solo exhibitions at areas together with the Peridot Gallery in New York.
Viewing town as a hospitable group for the humanities, Asawa moved to San Francisco and married architect Albert Lanier. By 1966, she had been commissioned to create the general public paintings “Andrea” (1966–68), that includes breastfeeding mermaids, in San Francisco’s extremely trafficked Ghirardelli Sq., and in 1968 she was appointed to town’s artwork fee.
Ruth Asawa’s “Andrea” (1966–68) was commissioned by developer William M. Roth for the renovation of Ghirardelli Sq.. (© 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS); photograph by Aiko Cuneo, courtesy David Zwirner)
Asawa was additionally instrumental in creating the general public arts-focused highschool now referred to as the Ruth Asawa Faculty of the Arts.
Google.org’s funding will go towards free group admission on April 13, a two-day symposium hosted by the group Past Battle and California School of the Arts, 4 public occasions, the College of California, Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, and the cultivation of a group backyard on the museum’s fourth ground terrace.
“Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into, or whatever occupation,” Asawa’s official artist web site quotes her as saying about her arts training philosophy. “It makes a person broader.”
Ruth Asawa, “Untitled (S.046a – d, Hanging Group of Four, Two – Lobed Forms)” (1961) (© 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS); photograph by Laurence Cune, courtesy David Zwirner)
Spanning 14,000 sq. ft of SFMOMA’s fourth ground, the exhibition will open with a gallery highlighting Asawa’s research on the now-defunct North Carolina experimental artwork college Black Mountain School from 1946 to 1949.
One other gallery will discover Asawa’s life in San Francisco within the Fifties, throughout which she developed her signature hanging wire sculptures. The exhibition attracts on archival supplies related to Asawa’s large-scale works, together with the “Japanese American Internment Memorial” (1990–94) and “Garden of Remembrance” (2000–2). The ultimate gallery will concentrate on the artist’s drawings of crops and flowers from between 1990 and early 2000s.
