First Permanent Ruth Asawa Gallery to Open in San Francisco for Artist’s Centennial
San Francisco is preparing to welcome a new, permanent home for the work of American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), whose looped-wire sculptures helped redefine postwar sculpture with a language that feels at once industrial and weightless. Opening this spring, the gallery will be located at the Minnesota Street Project in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood, according to an announcement from Asawa’s family foundation, Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. (RAL Inc.).
The inaugural exhibition, “Ruth Asawa: Untitled,” opens May 9. The title points to a defining aspect of Asawa’s practice: her frequent decision to leave sculptures without names, allowing form, shadow, and the viewer’s movement through space to do the work of meaning.
The first presentation will foreground Asawa’s signature suspended wire sculptures, made from industrial wire shaped into looping, interlaced volumes that read like drawings in air. RAL Inc. said the show will also include selections of Asawa’s paperfolds, watercolors, and cast works, offering a broader view of an artist often reduced, in popular memory, to a single iconic material.
The opening arrives as institutions continue to reassess Asawa’s place in American art, not only as a sculptor but also as a civic figure who shaped the cultural life of her adopted city. Born in Norwalk, California, in 1926, Asawa spent much of her childhood incarcerated in Japanese concentration camps during World War II. After a brief period in the Midwest, she studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she encountered Josef Albers. In 1949, she returned to California and established herself in San Francisco, where she lived and worked until her death in 2013 at age 87.
“San Francisco was Asawa’s home for more than 60 years, during which time she developed a unique artistic language, raised her family, and became a leading advocate for the arts and art education both locally and nationally,” Henry Weverka, Asawa’s grandson and president of RAL Inc. told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Opening a permanent space here in her adopted hometown seems like a wonderful way to celebrate her centennial for many years to come.”
Beyond the inaugural show, the new gallery plans a program of rotating exhibitions drawn from Asawa’s work, often paired with art by close collaborators and peers including Albers, Ray Johnson, Imogen Cunningham, and Anni Albers. The foundation also said an annual exhibition will be dedicated to work by students and faculty at the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, the public arts high school Asawa co-founded in 1982.
The gallery’s debut coincides with a major traveling exhibition, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” which has been introducing new audiences to the breadth of her practice. The show opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in April 2025, traveled to The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from October 2025 to February 2026, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao through September 13.
For San Francisco, the new space offers something distinct from a touring museum survey: a sustained, local encounter with an artist whose work and advocacy were inseparable from the city’s cultural fabric — and whose centennial is poised to extend well beyond a single commemorative year.
