It’s hard to think of an artist more generous with her time or prolific in her output than Ruth Asawa. She made her wide-ranging body of work across six decades, all the while raising six children, lobbying for arts funding, and teaching kids in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fame, categories, or even self-expression were of little interest to this acclaimed Japanese American artist, best known for her undulating looped-wire sculptures that seem to magically drip from above. Instead, she focused on ‘finding solutions to problems,’ as she once put it. She let her curiosities be her guide – a principle she applied not only to her art practice, which included design work, drawings, clay masks, and watercolors in addition to sculpture, but to all aspects of her life.

Just as Asawa, who died aged 87 in 2013, did not limit her creative output to one realm, her influence continues to stretch past the world of fine art. Widespread acclaim, particularly in the United States, arrived posthumously, with prominent exhibitions featuring her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017, while in 2020, she was honored by the US Postal Service with stamps featuring her artwork. Asawa’s fame reached a new pinnacle last year, when a soaring retrospective opened in San Francisco before traveling to New York and Spain. As a major survey opens in Switzerland at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel/Riehen, we look here at five lesser-known areas of Asawa’s practice that go beyond her renowned wire sculptures. Each speaks to the artist’s endless pursuit of solutions – and to the reach of her legacy.

Fashioning a legacy

It’s not surprising that the painstaking handwork required to make Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures spoke to the fashion world. In September 1953, Vogue magazine used the artist’s pieces as props in a photo shoot of elegant fall coats. The billowing shapes of the wire sculptures juxtapose beautifully with the models’ long, structured outerwear.

And Asawa’s influence on fashion has endured. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen looked to the artist for her fall 2020 couture collection. ‘Her work has always just been with me as a strong force of feminine artistry,’ van Herpen has said, noting in particular the way Asawa ‘zooms in on the delicacy of texture and light and shadow.’ Missoni’s spring 2025 ready-to-wear collection was also inspired by Asawa’s art. Filippo Grazioli, the house’s designer at the time, brought together its classic zigzag motif with the delicate, rippling layers of the artist’s work.

An arts education pioneer

Asawa was a fierce advocate for arts education, particularly in San Francisco. In 1968, she cofounded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, which brought professional artists and gardeners into the city’s public schools. As a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, Asawa lobbied local politicians for more support for the arts. She continued similar advocacy through her work on community boards, with the California Arts Council, and for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, she played a vital role in the opening of San Francisco’s first public arts high school, which in 2010 was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor.

The artist’s advocacy is rooted in her personal history. She was born in Southern California in 1926, the fourth of seven children to Japanese immigrant parents. After the outbreak of World War II, her family, like 120,000 other Americans of Japanese heritage, was unjustly removed from their home and incarcerated by the United States government. While she was held at a camp at the Santa Anita Racetrack in California, the teenager took drawing lessons from three fellow detainees, who were animators for Disney. These early art classes were pivotal as Asawa developed her own identity.

Public art for all ages

For Asawa, art belonged just as much outdoors, where masses of people could experience it, as it did in museums and galleries. Her first public art commission was Andrea (1966-1968), a whimsical bronze sculpture of two mermaids surrounded by frogs installed in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Asawa felt that public art should appeal to people of all ages. ‘For the old it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood, and for the young it would give them something to remember when they grow old,’ she said.

Other public commissions in the city include the intricate San Francisco Fountain (1970-1973) at the Grand Hyatt Hotel; Aurora (1984-1986), a rippling wheel made of stainless steel on the Embarcadero; and Origami Fountains (1975-1976/1999) in Japantown, one of which mimics the shape of a lotus bloom and the other, a vase.

In 1994, Asawa made one of her most moving public artworks: the Japanese American Internment Memorial, in San Jose. The massive bas relief depicts scenes both from her family’s particular story (like the prow of the ship that first carried her mother, a picture bride, to the US) and the broader experiences that Japanese Americans endured during their incarceration.

A garden for life

Before a young Asawa and her family were incarcerated, they leased 85 acres of land in Norwalk, California, where they grew crops like tomatoes and strawberries. It was a physically demanding life, even for the children, who were expected to help out. But working the land stuck with Asawa, and in her adulthood she kept a garden in her backyard. Its flowers and vegetables proved to be inspirational. As she once wrote, ‘I realized that my interest in watercolor and drawing was by no means satisfied,’ and she continually rendered the flowers and plants that she and Lanier grew at home or were gifted.

Asawa would often draw before her children awoke or after they went to bed – she was said to only need four hours of sleep a night. The tender depictions of chrysanthemum, watermelons, loquats, and hydrangea she made during these spells of quiet speak to her belief in the power of the natural world. ‘When you put a seed in the ground, it doesn’t stop growing,’ she said. ‘We, too, need to keep growing every moment of every day.’