"Like gliding through a landscape of infinite variety and coherence"–Ariella Budick
October 2025
Just two years after the Whitney retrieved the astounding Ruth Asawa from near oblivion with a show of her drawings, the Museum of Modern Art has one-upped the competition with a full-scale retrospective. I worried at first that there might not be many more pleasures left to mine. I needn’t have: Asawa produced new works at an industrial pace and continued her practice of daily drawing almost right up to her death in 2013. Such boundless creativity and potent work ethic ensured a lasting supply of joy.
“Doing is living,” she said. “That is all that matters.” Household chores fed her inventiveness, and art and life merged into a single constant endeavour. Using her hands, she transformed life’s ordinary flotsam — a pile of aubergines, a sprig of decayed autumn leaves — into marvels of expressive beauty.
The core of the MoMA exhibition is her sculptures, gossamer clouds of wire that drift near the ceiling, as if caught mid-daydream in an open sky. Illuminated from above, they cast wispy, quivering shadows on a set of white catwalks. To the extent that she was known at all, it was for these airy lattices, and the full extent of her output has only recently emerged. The show includes paintings, watercolours, lithographs, cast masks, public sculptures, folded paper — all of it a testament to her avid love of line. In every gallery, you can feel her finger tracing lines on surfaces or in space, arcs that bend, curve, twist, tangle and dance with exuberance and grace.
