The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s vast new exhibit, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” certainly inspires superlatives.
More than 300 objects, spanning more than five decades, fill a dozen galleries. The exhibit is funded in part by a $1.5 million donation from Google.org, the tech giant’s philanthropic division. It’s the largest corporate grant for a single show in the museum’s history.
But on the first wall of the first gallery, Asawa’s own words bring it all down to earth: “An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”
That’s the best introduction, and step-by-step guide, to an almost overwhelming array of artwork by Asawa, who spent much of her adult life in San Francisco.
The works range from fabric patterned with a rubber stamp to a 10-foot-tall looped-wire sculpture, from miniature experiments to massive carved redwood doors from her home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood.
Asawa (1926-2013) grew up in a farming community in Los Angeles County, but she made an indelible mark throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area. Not just in museums. Outdoors, her once-controversial mermaid fountain in Ghirardelli Square, another fountain depicting city life in minute detail on Stockton Street near Union Square, and the Japanese American Internment Memorial in downtown San Jose show her devotion to her community.
The bright, fresh and airy exhibit installation, on view through Sept. 2, feels inspired by Asawa’s work. It is co-curated by Janet Bishop of SFMOMA and Cara Manes of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibit will be shown next. Then the collection by this “local icon” will travel to museums in Bilbao, Spain and Basel, Switzerland.
“It is an immense privilege to present the full range of Ruth Asawa’s life’s work through this retrospective,” Bishop said in a statement. “Not only was Asawa an exceptionally talented artist — among the most distinguished sculptors of the 20th century and a major contributor in so many other mediums — but she lived her values in everything she did, modeling the importance of the arts and opening up creative opportunities for others at every turn.”
The exhibit begins with student works Asawa created from 1946 to 1949 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where her art instructors included Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers. On display are her already-inventive works on fabric and paper using the college laundry’s ”BMC” rubber ID stamp.
In 1947 she traveled to Toluca, Mexico, where she was introduced to the looped-wire basket-making technique that would become her signature style. Moving to San Francisco in 1949, she swiftly became known as an artist who fit perfectly into the Midcentury Modern movement, with works that looked organic as well as otherworldly.
In 1954 her work was featured among “Four Artist-Craftsmen” in Art and Architecture magazine, as well as in the background of a fashion spread in Vogue magazine. At her first New York gallery exhibit that year, she sold two sculptures to the Rockefellers and one to architect Philip Johnson.
The SFMOMA exhibit leads visitors through a veritable forest of hanging wire sculptures, no two alike. Asawa is best known for creating a continuous form within a form, but there are a variety of bulbs, gourd-like shapes and spirals. Some are sturdy constructions, others feathery. One is titled “Hanging Asymmetrical Twenty-three Interlocking Bubbles.”
That’s just the beginning of the path through Asawa’s career. In 1962 she received a gift of a dried desert plant from Death Valley, which led to her next major body of work. She created a double-sided form from a bundle of wire, reflecting both the branches and the root system of a tree. (There’s a massive similar work installed at the Oak Street entrance of the Oakland Museum.)
Asawa’s own words posted throughout the exhibit reflect the simplicity of her genius. She would turn a handful of stiff wire into something that looked organic. “I like that transition from hard to soft,” she said.
Another gallery is packed full of Asawa’s drawings and watercolors of flowers, bouquets and even vegetables. Also posted is a reminiscence by Asawa’s granddaughter Lilli Lanier, who grew up nearby. She quoted her grandmother: “Come over tomorrow. We’re going to draw eggplants. And then we’re going to eat them.”
One gallery suggests what it was like to visit Asawa’s home in Noe Valley. There’s a wall-size photograph of the living room from the past, and in the present a “reunion” of wire sculptures that hung from the rafters. There’s a selection of sketchbooks and examples of her studio experiments in clay, copper, bronze and electroplating.
Asawa’s outdoor works are highlighted by photographs, plans and personal documents. One is the two-sided bronze Japanese American Internment Memorial, at the federal building in downtown San Jose. It includes scenes depicting life before and after Asawa, her family and thousands of others were incarcerated during World War II.
“San Francisco Sits for a New Portrait in a Fountain Sculpture” was the Sunset magazine headline when Asawa’s massive but intricately detailed sculpture was installed on Stockton Street just off Union Square. The surface contained scores of portraits made by children with baker’s clay, then turned into 42 bronze panels.
Asawa wanted the fountain “to be touched, loved and patted.” In the museum exhibit, a duplicate bronze panel is installed on a wall within easy reach of children as well as adults. “Please Touch” is the message — referring not to Asawa’s other works, but this one for sure.
‘RUTH ASAWA: RETROSPECTIVE’
Through: Sept. 2
Where: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco.
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Friday through Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday
Admission: $33-$42, free for ages 18 and younger; 415-357-4000, sfmoma.org