Ruth Asawa was what players wish to name a world builder. Over the course of six a long time, primarily from her small house in San Francisco, she remodeled wire and different easy supplies into a complete universe of fruiting types and branching shapes.
And nowhere is her persistence and vary of imaginative and prescient extra obvious than the bold 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 area on MoMA’s sixth ground used for large momentary exhibitions. In San Francisco, it took up 15,000 sq. ft on the fourth ground, combining two galleries often 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 biggest present ever dedicated to a lady artist at MoMA or SFMoMA. However neither museum has been selling that reality for some anticipated and shocking 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 features 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 Paintings: © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner; picture: Henrik Kam
Requested if every other present by a lady artist has come shut, Bishop says no, noting that different solo exhibits in the identical area, by artists corresponding to 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 analogous response. She ran by means of current exhibits—Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper—out loud earlier than saying, “I do suppose that’s a secure declare to make” and “you convey up an excellent level”. (A spokesperson for SFMoMA has since confirmed that its Asawa present was its largest by a lady 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 known 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 she or he 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 sure, billing an exhibition as the most important of its variety is a surefire solution to encourage critics to strive their hand at slicing it down, primarily inviting them to make a listing of what the museum would have been good to depart out or different artists who ought to have acquired 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 also 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 biggest show of his sculptures or drawings or greatest museum present interval. This one-upmanship goes again not less than to 1980, when MoMA gave over its complete 53rd Avenue house to an exhaustive and exhausting 1,000-work Picasso survey, which helped outline the concept of blockbuster.
Extra not too long ago, 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 “probably the most intimate and complete portrait of Basquiat’s life and artwork thus far”.
The MoMA press launch as an alternative says of Asawa, extra subtly: “Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s delivery, the exhibition will embody some 300 objects that spotlight the core values of experimentation and interconnectedness pervading all dimensions of Asawa’s observe.”
“We’re definitely completely happy to wave the flag of touting the excellent 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 observe. She was a maximalist and a multitasker.”
Based on Marilyn Chase’s biography, Every little thing She Touched: The Lifetime of Ruth Asawa (2020), the artist benefited from the truth that she usually solely wanted 4 hours of sleep. Manes says this isn’t only a fantasy. “Once I was works with a few of her kids, I might say underneath my breath, as so usually was the case when being confronted along with her unimaginable, prolific work: ‘How did she do that? How might 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 always,” Manes says, “And these sketchbooks are peppered with photos of different folks sleeping.”
