The Brooklyn Rail

What is it about the world of shadows that is so enticing? I passed a particularly vivid shadow recently, that of an iron gate with a swirling pattern, but, unlike the physical gate, its lightless counterpart offered a translucent portal I could walk through—a threshold into another penumbral world.

What might we find in this shadow world? We might find ourselves entering a white-walled gallery with soaring ceilings, from which are suspended some of the most iconic three-dimensional works of artist Ruth Asawa (b. 1926; d. 2013). This spacious room on the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York contains the spiritual climax of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, an exhibition co-curated with the San Francisco MOMA and on view through February 7, 2026.

Walking into this gallery feels like entering a gothic cathedral, its piers and ribbed vaulting inspired by the forests. Here, two rows of the later permutations of Asawa’s metalwork sculptures suggest the nave. Since the sculptures hang from the ceiling, the elevated platforms below seem to serve the purpose of displaying the bulbous, undulating shadows. By emphasizing their presence, the curatorial team (Janet Bishop of SFMOMA and Cara Manes of MoMA) suggests the shadow is as much an aspect of Asawa’s sculpture as the metal itself.

A display case runs along one side of this gallery showing sketchbooks that make clear the connections between Asawa’s signature botanical drawings and her abstract metalworks. These sculptures more obviously take forms inspired by branches and coniferous needles. Although their shapes feel more contained and tightly wound into themselves than her other more liquid sculptures, the fuzzy profusion of “needles” on their ends suggests a progression from inward to outward that builds over the course of Asawa’s lifework.

Continuity enthralled Asawa creatively and intellectually, and her “continuous form within a form” is mesmerizing. She sought “a shape that was inside and outside at the same time.” Some of these sculptures emphasize a tangle that feathers outward. Others appear as funnels and bubbles; the exterior orb of one work appears as the interior shape of the one beside it.

Made of woven wire, many of her sculptures (throughout all phases of her career) cascade, drip, and bubble. They look like a slinky or chain mail (a term Asawa herself uses to describe them) that took the form of the liquid inside a lava lamp. They evade interiority and exteriority. Each one possesses a sense of movement, or, at least, the potential for movement. “Stabile” (stable + mobile) is how Asawa describes them. She also used descriptors such as “fragile,” “telescopic,” “collapsible,” words that appear in her Guggenheim Fellowship application, also displayed. She applied four times and was never accepted.

The retrospective captures a lifetime of art making. So let’s return to the opening gallery, to the early works. We enter a small gallery—light shines on sculptures and works on paper, the shadows are already cast in their starring roles. Asawa plays with the same forms across different media—watercolor, oil, cut paper on wood, Masonite, pastel, acrylic, graphite, ink—even technology (photocopier, mimeograph) helps her replicate nature. Her art tells the story of a lifelong obsession with organic forms, permutations, repetition, and nature. Throughout the exhibition, we learn about the pivotal experiences that shaped the artist.

During World War II, Asawa began her art education in American internment camps for citizens of Japanese descent. There, she met three Walt Disney Studio artists, also imprisoned, who helped her hone her own visual skills. “It was the art instruction by professional artists that kept our hope alive,” she says of this time. Later, her education took on an interdisciplinary element at Black Mountain College, where she studied under Bauhaus artist JosefAlbers, mathematician Max Dehn, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Her affiliation with the avant-garde Black Mountain College and commitment to community, activism, and public art represent values essential to honor in our contemporary art world.

One of the most intimately beguiling elements of this retrospective is that it looks back on more than an oeuvre, it looks back on a life. A slide projector gently clicks in a room that displays masks Asawa made of people important to her. It’s evident that she filled her life and home with others’ art. Other displays show botanical drawings with noted titles like Albert’s Rose Bouquet. It’s intimate, varied, and honors so much more than what is typically accepted as part of a portfolio; the show celebrates a whole life full of textile and interior design alongside sculpture and painting and drawing and printmaking and public art and art education. To try to separate these things, to put some of them above others, would be to misunderstand and misrepresent Asawa. “If you study the principles of nature,” she says, “then the answers are all there. The foreground and background become equally important… the space that [an object] makes is as important as the object itself.” As Asawa has said, it is all a continuous loop.

“Continuity” is a concept I normally associate with film editing—with motion-based narrative. Same with “time.” In a gallery celebrating Asawa’s work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, you will find a large lithograph of an abstracted red poppy, effervescing out and into its blue background while also drawing you to its center. In the final section of the show, called “Life Draws,” hangs one of Asawa’s botanical drawings, in the lower right corner of the page, black and white, naturalistic poppies shed their petals. The wall text reads, “Through the daily routine of recording the natural world around her, Asawa documented the extended community she shared it with, as well as the passage of time.”

What does it mean to look back at a life? The body of the artist is gone, but the body of work remains. In our shadow world, the darkness keeps shifting; the volume, already both sheer and substantial, is ever-changing, as, even in the artist’s absence, new permutations of her works form depending on how the light passes through them. The museum becomes, not a mausoleum, but a reverent, and revenant, cathedral, an afterlife. The show is called “a” retrospective, not “the”—more variations and perspectives, it implies, may come.

A security guard watches me take notes and sketch. Asawa was chasing an art with no beginning or end—one that eluded capture. The basic forms I draw could represent the sculptures or their shadows, making them one and the same, and erasing one of the most fundamental binaries of our world and of art, that of light and shadow. It’s here, among the elusive and eternal, that we enter what felt to me like a sacred, almost spiritual space, and, to answer our opening question, that tinge of uncontrollable mysticism attached to something so concrete is how the shadow entices. The guard says she’s glad I’m inspired, but she hopes I “aspire to inspire.” I think that’s a message Asawa would appreciate. A sculptor of air and shadow, a drawer unafraid of white space, left a sense of fullness, of a creative life that both relished in and pushed the limits of our natural world.