By Hilarie M. Sheets
Reporting from San Francisco
- Published April 4, 2025 Updated April 5, 2025 - NY Times
As the artist’s posthumous retrospective opens at SFMOMA, a reporter visits her family home and studio in Noe Valley, the center of her pioneering sculpture practice.
If you passed through the unlocked gate and rambling garden into Ruth Asawa’s Noe Valley home between 1966 and 2000, the 5-foot-tall Japanese American artist would likely have persuaded you to lie down on the kitchen table or living room floor and let her cover your face in plaster. Ethereal clusters of her undulating, looped-wire sculptures would have dangled from the rafters of the cathedral ceiling while her six children, and later 10 grandchildren, ran underfoot.
“Ruthie could get people to do very bizarre things — because to have your face cast is a completely intimate act,” said Addie Lanier, one of Asawa’s five surviving children. Addie’s son, Henry Weverka, who also had his hands and feet cast by his grandmother throughout childhood, and now oversees her estate, added, “She said she liked capturing a moment in time.”
In the last 35 years of the 20th century, inspired by a Life magazine essay picturing Roman masks and busts, Asawa cast the faces of at least 600 people. They included neighborhood children as well as her mentor, the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, an influential teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s and Albert Lanier, the 5-foot-8 architecture student from Georgia whom she met and married while studying there. Asawa, who died in 2013 at age 87, hung her ever-expanding constellation of life masks on the ceder-shingled facade of their Arts & Crafts style home in a dramatically inclusive gesture of welcome.
“If she asked you to do something, no one ever said no,” said Andrea Jepson, Asawa’s former neighbor who let the artist cast her whole body shortly after giving birth in 1967 as the model for “Andrea,” a bronze mermaid fountain in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Jepson recalls the house being “filled with other people all the time. Nothing was compartmentalized.”
On the eve of Asawa’s first posthumous retrospective, opening April 5 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Addie and Henry joined Paul Lanier, Asawa’s youngest child, who now lives in the family home, for a personal tour of Asawa’s creative universe, where artmaking, family life and community activism flowed together. The house is nested within a garden created by Albert.
Ruth Asawa’s Astonishing Universe Began at Her Door
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