- MoMA, through Feb. 7, 2026
MoMA is hosting Ruth Asawa’s first major museum survey to reach New York following its debut at SFMOMA. Spanning six decades, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Asawa’s sustained exploration of the formal and emotional resonances between natural and human-made structures across media including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings and works on paper. “Life draws,” she wrote, framing artmaking as a mode of full presence, and continuity and repetition shape this practice as she returns again and again to the same flowers and plants, echoing universal natural structures while treating repetition as a meditative search for order within entropy. An organic logic underpins Asawa’s approach to both sculpture and drawing as sculpture, driven by an effort to capture the life within objects while revealing the underlying harmony that connects all things. Her signature “continuous form within a form” evolves here through doubled and interlocking interiors, split and woven wire strands and layered structures activated by negative space, opening networks of connection rather than enclosure. At the same time, these repeated gestures of weaving and mending carry a quiet ritual and spiritual charge, suggesting care, repair and healing in the context of diasporic trauma, and together the works form a partial inventory of the sculptural vocabulary Asawa developed over time, using industrial wire to reimagine organic form and situate her practice within an ongoing dialogue with nature, ritual and the history of sculpture.
