Six Decades of Ruth Asawa’s Sculptures at MoMA

Ruth Asaw: A Retrospective
Digital Image © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Jonathan Dorado. Artwork © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., Courtesy David Zwirner.

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective on view at The Museum of Modern Art from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“I’m not so interested in the expression of something. I’m more interested in what the material can do. So that’s why I keep exploring,” said artist, educator, and civic leader Ruth Asawa, reflecting on a six-decade-long career. Featuring some 300 artworks, Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective charts the artist’s lifelong explorations of materials and forms in a variety of mediums, including wire sculpture, bronze casts, drawings, paintings, prints, and public works. This first posthumous survey celebrates the ways in which Asawa continuously transformed materials and objects into subjects of contemplation, unsettling distinctions between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, and negative and positive space.

Event Information
Start Date: October 19, 2025
End Date: February 7, 2026
Venue: MoMA

Ruth Asaw: A Retrospective