WIRE MOTHER

For Ruth Asawa, making art meshed with making a life with others.

- BY JULIAN LUCAS

Ruth Asawa rarely missed a chance to loop others into her work. At Black Mountain College, she would wake before dawn to rouse Josef Albers, the Bauhaus color theorist, so that they could watch the sun rise through the fog on the hills. At seventeen, in a Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas, she sketched caricatures of her fellow-detainees. Some of her signature wire sculptures—diaphanous, undulating forms, like chain-mail invertebrates—were made with the help of her sons and daughters. And in 1970, when she was commissioned to create a fountain for San Francisco’s Union Square, she enlisted schoolchildren from across the city in the design.

Her circle has only widened since her death, in 2013. Long esteemed in the art world and a local hero in San Francisco, Asawa has lately become a national figure, both for her sculptural inventions—burnished by our era’s nostalgia for mid-century-modern minimalism—and for the arc of her life. A Whitney show in 2019 returned her to prominence, and that same year saw the release of a children’s book about her. More recently, she was honored with a crater on Mercury. Now a retrospective that includes more than three hundred works, chosen by the curators Cara Manes and Janet Bishop, has travelled from SFMOMA to MOMA, where it is the largest exhibition the institution has ever devoted to a woman.