Ruth Asawa's Home Is the Star of SFMOMA Show

When Ruth Asawa asked visitors to do something for her, she typically got her way, and that could mean becoming a work of art. She would create a life cast of friends' and neighbors' faces in bronze, which she hung in her extraordinary home in San Francisco.

A major touring show of Asawa's work, which opened at SFMoMA on April 5, which is due to travel to New York's MoMA in the fall, features a display of some of the hundreds of life masks that provided a unqiue welcome to her home in Noe Valley. In the show, the masks are shown along with a set of hand-carved redwood doors installed in the entrance of her Arts and Crafts-style home.

Former neighbor Andrea Jepson went further. She let Asawa cast her whole body shortly after giving birth. The cast became “Andrea”, Asawa's bronze mermaid fountain in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square.

The private sale by Asawa's family to SFMOMA of their mother's late 1950s wire sculpture, Untitled (S.114, Hanging, Six-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form with One Suspended and Two Tied Spheres) in 2014, a major acquisition brokered by David Zwirner Gallery, meant they did not have to sell the Noe Valley home and garden.

"Ruth Asawa: Retrospective", which has been co-organized by SFMOMA and MoMA, is due to travel in to the Guggenheim Bilbao and Fondation Beyeler in 2026-27.