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The first major posthumous survey of the Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) opens this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before travelling to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As well as Asawa’s signature wire sculptures, the exhibition will include paintings, drawings, prints and archival materials. The show’s co-curator Janet Bishop has picked out five key books for better understanding the artist’s life and career.
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College (2015) by Helen Molesworth
“After her aspirations to become a teacher were thwarted by anti-Japanese discrimination, Asawa enrolled at Black Mountain College and resolved to become an artist. This major volume illuminates the rich creative context in which Asawa thrived as she studied under the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, and alongside peers including the photographer Hazel Larsen Archer and her future husband Albert Lanier.”
Ruth Asawa: Through Line (2023), edited by Kim Conaty and Edouard Kopp
“Prior to Kim Conaty and Edouard Kopp’s recent show of the same name at the Whitney and the Menil Collection, drawings were a relatively little-known aspect of Asawa’s practice. This striking publication offers multiple lenses into her lifelong work in two dimensions, ranging from sketches of nature to intricately patterned ‘meander’ watercolours, and prints made from unexpected materials such as potatoes, apples and fish.”
Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape (2024) by Sam Nakahira
“This beautiful graphic biography focuses on Asawa’s early life, from her childhood on a farm near Los Angeles and incarceration as a teenager during the Second World War, through to her first decade as an artist in San Francisco. The highly engaging illustrations feature Asawa wire sculptures and views captured by the artist’s friend Imogen Cunningham, as well as imagined scenes that shed light on Asawa as an artist and person.”
Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025) by Jordan Troeller
“For Asawa, whose studio was always at home, there was an intentional seamlessness between art-making and family. This volume addresses how Asawa, a mother of six, along with San Francisco peers including the jeweller Merry Renk and the architectural historian Sally Woodbridge, forged their own paths by integrating motherhood and career.”
Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work (2019) by Tamara Schenkenberg
“This 2018-19 show catalogue features insightful essays as well as installation views of Asawa’s suspended looped-wire sculptures as installed in the Pulitzer Foundation’s gorgeous Tadao Ando building. A bonus is the illustrated lexicon of the artist’s signature forms created in collaboration with Asawa’s daughters Aiko Cuneo and Addie Lanier.”
• Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 5 April-2 Sept; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 19 October-
7 February 2026