October 19 2025 -> February 07 2026

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
T : +1 (212) 708 9400
11 West 53rd Street
10019 New York
United States

Contact

T : (212) 708 9400
information@moma.org
https://www.moma.org

Featuring around 300 works, Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective traces the artist’s lifelong exploration of materials and forms across a wide range of media, including wire sculpture, bronze casts, drawings, paintings, prints, and public commissions. This first posthumous survey celebrates Asawa’s ability to transform materials and objects into contemplative subjects, challenging distinctions between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, and negative and positive space.

Asawa created art daily, exploring the endless possibilities of simple materials such as paper and wire since her time at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. After moving to San Francisco in 1949, her practice expanded to include infinite variations of abstract looped-wire sculptures alongside calligraphic ink paintings. Community was central to Asawa’s vision. From the late 1960s onward, she completed numerous public commissions, fountains, murals, and memorials, and played a pioneering role in arts education in the Bay Area and beyond. Reflecting her integrative approach, the retrospective offers multiple points of entry into her work, encouraging close observation while revealing her philosophy that all acts held creative potential and that life and art-making were inseparable.