Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

by Janet Bishop (Editor), Cara Manes (editor), Anne Anlin Cheng (contributor)

Genres: Art

336 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2025

Reviews

[Sheila]

Recently saw Ruth Asawa’s work featured in a current exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There is an understated elegance to her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms.

Wish I could afford to purchase one of her sculptures. But alas I could afford to purchase this book which was available as a companion to this excellent exhibition. This book covers her art work and it is beautifully presented.

[Karen]

If seeing is doing, and doing is being, then being is also seeing. Asawa's art requires what she called the "total act" of seeing, grounding us in the raw experience of space and form beyond binary distinctions, circumventing language and its constraints, embracing the ineffable. The visual and sensorial experience solicited by her works exists independent of subject matter. Instead, through their intrinsic properties — movement, continuity, negative space, line, porosity, flexibility, modularity, and abstraction, among others — they create a world outside the known one, a world that can contain an object that defies definition.

this exhibition catalogue book of art and essays accompanies the Ruth Asawa retrospective exhibition that i saw at SFMOMA last year (and that is still on the road in Spain and Switzerland). thank you to Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. for gifting this book when i went to visit their new gallery space at Minnesota Street Project earlier this year. it is one that i will treasure for a long time! i don’t understand all of the essays (some are more academically written), but i enjoyed the technical commentary and analysis alongside the biographical timelines and photographs.

[Heather]

This entire book is lovely—from the essays at the beginning and end, to the structure and layout of how the art images are presented, to the cover design and quality of paper. I adore Ruth Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures, and now I appreciate her so much more as a person and artist of multiple mediums. It was interesting to learn that she was a student of Josef Albers. Her work is inspiring and beautiful. This book is fantastic.

[Aiden]

Great photos and essays. Excited to see these works in person at MoMA now that I know more about them!