I’ve been thinking about Ruth Asawa’s shadows. They’re surprising, not shaped how you might expect: While one of her sinuous hanging basket sculptures might be elongated, with an oblong head and abdominal segments, for instance, its shadow might have a round belly and a shortened neck — another character entirely. Shadows aren’t an afterthought in Asawa’s work, but another dimension of it — another way in which one thing can contain or serialize into an infinity. What plenitude; what a rich, generous world.
The Museum of Modern Art’s edition of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective solves the problems critic Alex Paik raised in his excellent review of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s version. Whereas that show downplayed racism in her life, the main exhibition text here points to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in camps as an uprooting injustice; it explicitly states that Asawa was denied an art teaching degree due to anti-Japanese prejudice. Whereas Paik found the SFMoMA show crowded, this one felt like an aquarium of light and space. Its floor plan is continuous — you can walk around either side of every wall, and there’s never a wrong choice, always another chance to loop back around, as if you were tracing the paths of one of her loping wires. You’ll move from a room about her experiments with nature into another dedicated to her tireless advocacy for arts education — something else Paik wanted from this exhibition — and then continue on in the first room, the experience all the richer for the detour. This is such a wonderful and well-curated show that it gifted this perpetually skeptical critic the freedom to let my thoughts and feelings and pleasure bloom and wilt, fold into one another, as if I were one of Asawa’s lovely vessels.
In fact, we are part of Asawa’s artistic germination from the very first room, dedicated to the time she spent in her early 20s at Black Mountain College, in the late 1940s. In an untitled oil and watercolor on paper inspired by autumn leaves, bulbous forms that anticipate the silhouette of her later sculptures overlap gently, as if nuzzling. The thin support buckles under the weight of the pigment, as if struggling to hold the full measure of Asawa’s vision. Nearby, the oil-on-masonite “Figures on Green” (c. 1947–48) contains eight rounded figures with arms held aloft in various states of elongation and compression, as if they’re leaping off the surface. A couple of years later, she found the dimension she was searching for, with paperfold works that zigzag dizzyingly on the wall.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.691, Wall-Mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes) (1951), ink on paper
There’s one shaped like a giant seed, the folded paper and pod alike a labyrinth of intricacy and possibility. Or should I say that it is a seed pod, for Asawa’s works aren’t metaphorical, allusive, concerned with their own cleverness. They don’t stand in for other things, they become their own versions of them. It feels, for instance, as if the real-life stripes of a watermelon and the flow of ink through paper in a 1960s work depicting one were guided by one and the same hand.
I love that the curators took the time to carve that same pleated-paper pattern into one wall and chose to suspend a vitrine there containing patents, newspaper clippings, and magazine spreads by and about the artist. It suggested to me that all the walls of the exhibition might fold into each other, that no aspect of her work exists apart from another, nor even any facet of her life.
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Asawa’s basket sculptures seem to make that continuity between all things tangible. Figuring out how they come into being twists the mind into a Gordian knot, turning the simple task of following a plane into the experience of traversing a Möbius strip: exterior becomes interior becomes exterior again. Each work toggles between all manner of forms — anthropomorphic figures and alien creatures, deep-sea invertebrates and uteruses — at once, and yet somehow they’re always more. One has a raindrop-shaped head and tail, like a continuous chain of fluid moments suspended in time, where the beginning is also the end. Another evokes stacked witches’ hats or wormholes, child’s play and the very fabric of time-space at once. They sway or spin so slowly that they seem cosmically removed from you, like a planet that turns once in your lifetime. And yet you’re an integral part of that very system — it’s your steps, your breath, that propels them.
Later in life, Asawa’s sculptures became fractal, exploding outward rather than tending inward, each branch end begetting ever more. Are they roots or tendrils, beginnings or ends? As always, both, and then some. I raised my arms to take a picture and, looking at my own shadow, saw myself as one of those ecstatic leaping figures from that very first gallery, as if I had been spun off the tip of one of her dandelion sculptures and sent out into the world as both messenger and message, the infinite seed of her vision contained within me.
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective opens at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) on October 19 and continues through February 7, 2026.
