Ruth Asawa was what players prefer to name a world builder. Over the course of six a long time, primarily from her small residence in San Francisco, she reworked wire and different easy supplies into a complete universe of fruiting kinds and branching shapes.
And nowhere is her persistence and vary of imaginative and prescient extra obvious than the formidable retrospective that opens on the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) this week (19 October-7 February 2026) after its run on the San Francisco Museum of Trendy Artwork (SFMoMA) this spring and summer season. Practically 5 years within the making, the present options 275 of her works, together with greater than 60 of the looped-wire sculptures she made well-known in addition to bronze casts, paper folds and a variety of work and drawings that reveal her connection to nature.
In New York the present will occupy the 16,000-sq.-ft house on MoMA’s sixth ground used for large short-term exhibitions. In San Francisco, it took up 15,000 sq. ft on the fourth ground, combining two galleries normally used for various functions. The SFMoMA illustrated guidelines, with 327 items (together with some ephemera), spans 81 pages. MoMA’s, with 376 objects (due to extra archival materials), is 94 pages.
By guidelines alone, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective ranks as the most important present ever dedicated to a girl artist at MoMA or SFMoMA. However neither museum has been selling that reality for some anticipated and stunning causes.
SFMoMA’s chief curator Janet Bishop, who joined the museum in 1988, says it had merely not occurred to her. “We knew that it was going to be a really wealthy, full presentation that checked out all facets of her inventive manufacturing,” she says, “however I didn’t take into consideration the sheer numbers.”
Set up view of Ruth Asawa: Retrospective at SFMoMA Art work: © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner; picture: Henrik Kam
Requested if another present by a girl artist has come shut, Bishop says no, noting that different solo exhibits in the identical house, by artists reminiscent of Eva Hesse and Vija Celmins, had far fewer works. “The one exhibits that might have been bigger are exhibitions that took a number of flooring like Andy Warhol and Sol LeWitt,” she says.
Cara Manes, the MoMA portray and sculpture curator who co-organised the present, had an identical response. She ran by way of current exhibits—Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper—out loud earlier than saying, “I do assume that’s a secure declare to make” and “you convey up an awesome level”. (A spokesperson for SFMoMA has since confirmed that its Asawa present was its largest by a girl artist measured by variety of objects; MoMA declined to take action.)
Quiet confidence over shouted superlatives
To some extent, these curators appear to be taking their cue from Asawa by not establishing bragging rights for the present. Assured in her personal path as an artist, even within the Nineteen Fifties when artwork critics referred to as her a housewife and described her sculptures in ornamental phrases, Asawa was extra collaborative than aggressive with different artists. She was a longtime educator and six-time mom, usually making artwork whereas cooking dinner or after everybody went to sleep, and he or she was not given to pissing contests. The arc of her profession is marked by an honesty to supplies, integrity to her imaginative and prescient and integration of artmaking into on a regular basis household life.
To make certain, billing an exhibition as the most important of its type is a surefire solution to encourage critics to strive their hand at reducing it down, primarily inviting them to make an inventory of what the museum would have been sensible to depart out or different artists who ought to have obtained equally expansive showcases. However the lack of superlatives in selling this retrospective, which travels on to the Guggenheim Bilbao and Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2026-27, may additionally mirror a persisting gender inequality: how the artwork world nonetheless treats examples of female and male genius otherwise.
David Hockney, as an illustration, appears to have a “greatest retrospective” each 5 years, capped by the one at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris this 12 months showcasing round 400 works. (On the similar time, he likes to lampoon the artwork world’s inflated rhetoric, titling his newest gallery present at Annely Juda in London, opening 7 November, Some Very, Very, Very New Work Not But Proven in Paris.)
Picasso curators regularly compete to supply the most important show of his sculptures or drawings or greatest museum present interval. This one-upmanship goes again at the least to 1980, when MoMA gave over its total 53rd Avenue residence to an exhaustive and exhausting 1,000-work Picasso survey, which helped outline the thought of blockbuster.
Extra lately, Jean-Michel Basquiat curators have been vying to see who can do the definitive mega-exhibition, with the current bicoastal present King Pleasure billed as “essentially the most intimate and complete portrait of Basquiat’s life and artwork up to now”.
The MoMA press launch as a substitute says of Asawa, extra subtly: “Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s beginning, the exhibition will embody some 300 objects that spotlight the core values of experimentation and interconnectedness pervading all dimensions of Asawa’s apply.”
“We’re definitely completely happy to wave the flag of touting the great nature of the retrospective exhibition,” Manes says, calling it “staggeringly broad”. However, she provides: “Our framing had primarily to do with the exhibition being the artist’s first main profession retrospective since her passing in 2013.”
At SFMoMA, Bishop likewise says her focus was not metrics however presenting Asawa’s work “in its full depth and breadth. She labored not solely in wire but in addition paper, wooden, clay and bronze. She experimented with electroplating. She crammed a whole lot of sketchbooks, a sustained drawing apply. She was a maximalist and a multitasker.”
In line with Marilyn Chase’s biography, The whole lot She Touched: The Lifetime of Ruth Asawa (2020), the artist benefited from the truth that she sometimes solely wanted 4 hours of sleep. Manes says this isn’t only a delusion. “After I was works with a few of her youngsters, I’d say beneath my breath, as so usually was the case when being confronted together with her unbelievable, prolific work: ‘How did she do that? How may she have had time to do that?’ They’d say, ‘She simply didn’t sleep.’”
The curator additionally discovered anecdotal proof of this late-night productiveness in Asawa’s archives. “She sketched continuously,” Manes says, “And these sketchbooks are peppered with photographs of different folks sleeping.”
