This month, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) received the largest corporate donation it’s ever gotten for a single exhibition.
SFMOMA announced on March 5 that it would host the first major posthumous retrospective of works by artist, activist, and educator Ruth Asawa, who died in 2013, backed by $1.5 million in funding from Google’s philanthropy offshoot, Google.org. The exhibition will open on April 5 with 300 works spanning Asawa’s six-decade career, curated by SFMOMA Chief Curator Janet Bishop and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Assistant Curator Cara Manes.
“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,” Bishop said in an October press release.
The exhibition will remain on display at SFMOMA until September, after which it will travel to MoMA, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Switzerland’s Fondation Beyele through January 2027.
Asawa, known for her biomorphic suspended wire sculptures, was born in 1926 and detained alongside her mother and siblings in 1942 in a concentration camp for Japanese Americans at a horse race track in Santa Anita, California. The artist and her family were then moved to a camp in Arkansas, where she graduated high school. Asawa rose to prominence as a sculptor in the late 1950s with solo exhibitions at spaces including the Peridot Gallery in New York.
Viewing the city as a hospitable community for the arts, Asawa moved to San Francisco and married architect Albert Lanier. By 1966, she had been commissioned to create the public artwork “Andrea” (1966–68), featuring breastfeeding mermaids, in San Francisco’s highly trafficked Ghirardelli Square, and in 1968 she was appointed to the city’s art commission.
Asawa was also instrumental in creating the public arts-focused high school now known as the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.
Google.org’s funding will go toward free community admission on April 13, a two-day symposium hosted by the organization Beyond Conflict and California College of the Arts, four public events, the University of California, Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, and the cultivation of a community garden on the museum’s fourth floor terrace.
“Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into, or whatever occupation,” Asawa’s official artist website quotes her as saying about her arts education philosophy. “It makes a person broader.”
Spanning 14,000 square feet of SFMOMA’s fourth floor, the exhibition will open with a gallery highlighting Asawa’s studies at the now-defunct North Carolina experimental art school Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1949.
Another gallery will explore Asawa’s life in San Francisco in the 1950s, during which she developed her signature hanging wire sculptures. The exhibition draws on archival materials associated with Asawa’s large-scale works, including the “Japanese American Internment Memorial” (1990–94) and “Garden of Remembrance” (2000–2). The final gallery will focus on the artist’s drawings of plants and flowers from between 1990 and early 2000s.
The news of the major exhibition funding comes as San Francisco museums, including the de Young and Legion of Honor, brace for potential layoffs and budget reductions following a mandate from the city’s former mayor for all city departments to cut their expenses by 15%.
