The Vivid Ecologies of Home — Ruth Asawa at SFMOMA

Tucked into the retrospective exhibition of San Francisco icon Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is a photograph of the house she shared with her husband Alan Lanier and their six children, a 1908 Arts and Crafts house in Noe Valley. The high-roof curving down from the peak to the walls hangs with woven wire sculptures, bulbous and airy jellyfish suspended from the rounded beams. In the foreground, a table crawls with what appear to be clay sculptures—simple, playful figures with sinuous bodies. Perhaps crafted by the gaggle of children astride a fireplace (though one girl—cat perched on her lap with their nose tucked behind her arm—watches the others) in an eclectic array of chairs. Behind them a mostly and messily filled bookcase, another to the left is stacked with magazines. God’s-eye yarn works and paintings hang on another built-in bookshelf. Through the double doors behind them, a round table with its own set of disarrayed chairs and a china cabinet, but here the wire sculptures hang even closer to the ground.

A dog basks lazily in a patch of sunlight on the patterned carpet.

The photograph is savvily blown up in the exhibition, with Asawa’s woven sculptures sighing with shadow softly above. Squint through the black-and-white, and you can feel the familial bohemian grandeur of that room. More than dreaming of living there, I wish I’d grown up in such a place.

I’m spending such slavish detail on this photograph because this home—in all its beauty and disarray, crafty children and askew books and stockpiled magazines and a sunlit dog and comfy cat and art along with all the many remnants and expressions of creativity—here dissolves the boundaries between design, art, and life. The everyday personal intimacy of family and home becomes an absolute site of artistic expression.

And the home and its life are centered in the exhibition, even their grand, hand-carved front doors make it into the show.

While the Asawa and Lanier family’s place in Noe is duly famous from this majestic room to the glorious garden she and Lanier made and maintained, this fluidity and boundless bounty is the heart of her work. They can also easily be read as modernist objects emerging out of Black Mountain College’s collapsing of design and art and the practice of everyday life, the material of metal wire in tune with materials of modernity and their otherworldly forms, though drawing from a knot stitch she learned from a local basket weaver on holiday in Mexico. Biomorphic, shaping the air, these curving bodies merge traditional weaving with modern forms, both full and empty, they shape the air with subtlety, always chased by soft shadows that twirl and scatter dances on the walls behind them.

Interned during the war, and shut out of the Guggenheim four times, Ruth Asawa through the radical education at Black Mountain and her own ranging, vivid imagination found an artful life despite little support for her brand of work, her particular gender, and her identity as a Japanese American.

In a questionnaire in the exhibition, Asawa, when asked, “Do you earn your living through art?” answers simply, “No, housewife.”

There’s the gendered narrative of female artists being considered through domesticity and family, while their male counterparts never. And though the cruel limitations of gender dynamics shaped her life surely, the art she made with her life, a self-admitted housewife, is stunningly worthy of consideration. And perhaps all the men, whilst however successful in between the frames and on a plinth, the ignorance of or failure of their personal lives has its own fraught relationship to their work. The things we make live independent lives, but they are formed by their makers and their makers are formed by their lives. But even that aside, this seamless melding of creative practice and daily life in Asawa’s practice is its own glorious artwork, and a model of a life.

Asawa clearly lived artfully—and made art that pulses with life.

Look at her drawings, paintings, and prints of flowers—some are certainly from her garden. While some are loose and poetic, others have the same sharp and shapely rigor of her hanging wire sculptures. Though often undulating, many of the wire works fractal in almost heavy metal splendor. And these feel like uncanny fauna and flora, strange creatures nurtured alongside her children and garden blooms, with fierce love and subtle brilliance.

Asawa made her home into its own rich ecology, both living space and studio, where craft and art and life are linked and twined together with patient care. And her care to shape a world spread outward, her activism as a wondrously generous community member of San Francisco is legend. Her name adorning the local public art high school is well-earned; it would not have come into being without her.

And though this is hardly the first time she’s been shown at SFMOMA or institutionally in the Bay (2022’s Faces of Ruth Asawa at the Cantor, or SFMOMA’s Lineage: Paul Klee and Ruth Asawa in 2021, and nearly numberless group and collection shows locally), but the grandeur and depth, the sense of home both in a house and in our city is profound in this utterly necessary retrospective of one of the Bay’s most important artists. At Ruth Asawa’s retrospective, I feel home again.

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