There’s a moment in “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” that feels overwhelming for any admirer of the San Francisco artist.
San Francisco Lauds Ruth Asawa in Stunning SFMOMA Homecoming
Originally published in the SF Chronicle. Written by Tony Bravo
Jana Ašenbrennerová/For the S.F. Chronicle
Turning the corner in the fourth-floor galleries, there is a space designed to evoke the living room of Asawa’s Noe Valley home, where she lived with her husband, architect Albert Lanier, and their six children, from 1961 until her death. The aged wood and a sense of lived-in warmth places visitors in the center of Asawa’s work as an artist, mother and arts education advocate. The house, where Asawa also kept her studio, was a center of family, community and her arts education advocacy.
Dominating the far wall is a photo from 1969 by Rondal Partridge of the room in all its working beauty. Asawa’s daughter Addie Lanier and son Paul Lanier and neighborhood kids sit at a large table, baker’s clay figures in the foreground. The family dog, Henry, sits on the floor. Among the art in the picture are examples of the hanging, looped-wire sculptures for which Asawa is best known.
Jana Ašenbrennerová/For the S.F. Chronicle
Several of those same sculptures now hang above visitors in the gallery, high enough that you can walk under and stare up into them.
“It was definitely emotional for everybody,” said Henry Weverka, the president of Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. As Asawa’s grandson, he knows that room intimately. “I think that picture encapsulates my childhood and who my grandmother was.”
Janet Bishop, the chief curator of SFMOMA and co-curator of “Ruth Asawa” with Cara Manes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called the living room gallery a testament to the “seamlessness” of Asawa’s life and work.
“It was important to me not to create an artificial separation between Asawa’s studio practice and her family life,” said Bishop. “The house was an epicenter of her production.”
“Ruth Asawa Retrospective” has been in the works for five years and contains more than 300 objects. It is the (overdue) celebration the artist merits. Asawa (1926-2013) remains an enormous presence in San Francisco, with a large concentration of her numerous public projects in the Bay Area found here. Since her death, there have been multiple smaller shows of her work across the globe.
“Asawa has had this tremendous resurgence, but my aunts, uncles and my mother have been working at this for 65 years now,” said Weverka, the son of Addie. “They were the ones who were helping with her public commissions, coiling wire with her in the 1950s, starting to tell her story long before she passed away.”
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