6 Artists to Follow If You Like Ruth Asawa

There was very little uplifting art world news in the fall of 2020. However, the release of USPS Forever stamps honoring Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa was one celebratory occasion. Close-up photographs of her diaphanous, gravity-defying loop wire sculptures graced a series of ten stamps. Not only was the postage beautiful, but the occasion inspired renewed interest in the pioneering artist, leading to widespread recognition of her enduring contributions to art seven years after her death. She’s since received the National Medal of Arts and been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Ruth Asawa Through Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2022, her biomorphic wire forms were showcased in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Born in 1926, Asawa, along with her parents and six siblings, was confined to Japanese internment camps in California and Arkansas during World War II. There, she learned to draw with both hands, using whatever media she could find. The experience afforded the young artist an anti-hierarchical approach to materials that she maintained throughout her career. Asawa believed her lines could “go anywhere.” They led her from finely limned sketches, calligraphic ink paintings, and patterned, geometric abstractions, to her signature tied- and looped-wire hanging sculptures. While she is best known for her voluminous, cascading lobed forms, Asawa never stopped drawing—the medium she described as both “the greatest pleasure and the most difficult.”

Both Asawa’s drawings and sculptures borrow from natural forms like spiraled snail shells, latticed insect wings, spider webs, and light refracting through morning dew. No matter the material, her work is consistently characterized by meticulous detail, repetition, and a sense of levity that defies common perceptions of weight and gravity. “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special,” Asawa once said.

The artist’s first posthumous survey, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” opening at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on April 4th, gathers more than 300 works that span her six-decade career. The presentation traces Asawa’s career from her illustrations, to her sculptures, and back again, illuminating her enduring influence on artists across media and movements.

Here are six contemporary artists Ruth Asawa enthusiasts should follow.

B. 1955, Dayton, Ohio. Lives and works in Emeryville, California.

Mari Andrews considers her ethereal sculptures “three-dimensional drawings” that continue her lifelong drawing practice. Composed of steel wire, metal panels, branches, and various found objects like pine cones and honeycombs, they visualize the artist’s enduring relationship with nature’s overlooked forms and materials. These lyrical abstractions combine elemental shapes in novel configurations that simultaneously register as ancient and contemporary. Similar to Asawa’s suspended lobes, Andrews’s sculptures cast shadows as vivid as holograms that oscillate along with the light throughout the day. In this way, both artists set static objects in motion, imbuing matter with the capacity for continuous transformation.

Andrews earned her BFA from the University of Dayton, Ohio, and her MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship and several residencies, including the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, California, and the Cold Press Gallery in Norfolk. Her work is held in the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, and she is represented by Maya Frodeman Gallery.

B. 1975, Australia. Lives and works in Chicago.

Raised in Nigeria and now living in the United States, Nnenna Okore converts organic materials into mesmerizing, vibrantly colored sculptures. In these works, Okore turns ethically sourced burlap, paper, jute rope, and bioplastics into three-dimensional gestures that appear to burst from the wall. The intricately sewn, richly textured shapes unfurl and intertwine like root systems, capillaries, or flowering vines. Through her use of natural materials and forms, the artist hopes to draw attention to conservatism and sustainability. Like Asawa, Okore relies on iterative, labor-intensive techniques in her practice, such as tying, twisting, teasing, and weaving. Both artists represent nature’s cyclical processes by creating forms that appear to have no end, looping back in on themselves and beginning again.

Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from Monash University in Melbourne. She is a professor and the head of the Art Department at Chicago’s North Park University. Her work has been featured in several major exhibitions such as “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; “We Face Forward,” at Manchester Art Gallery, U.K., and “Africa Africans,” at Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo.

B. 1982, Cleveland, Ohio. Lives and works in New York.

Instead of renouncing the feminine connotations traditionally assigned to craft techniques, Marcy Chevali embraces the textile practices once dismissed as “women’s work.” By applying processes borrowed from knitting and weaving to lampworking and wire-tying, she creates enthralling, biomorphic-shaped nets that are freestanding or suspended from the ceiling. These illusory glass and wire grids reinterpret delicacy as complexity and fragility as strength. Chevali, like Asawa, is interested in permeability and creating boundaries that visually expand and contract. While her webs define and demarcate space, they don’t obstruct it, making it possible to see through them from every angle. For both artists, freedom is a formal and political ideal.

Marcy Chevali has a BFA from the University of Ohio, and an MFA from the Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others. She won a Ron Desmett Memorial Award for Imagination with Glass from Pittsburgh Glass Center and has received grants from the Queens Council of the Arts and FST Studio Projects.

B. 1948, Finnøy Island, Norway. Lives and works in Molde, Norway.

Inspired by her childhood on a tiny island on the northwest coast of Norway, Gjertrud Hals crafts sculptures that entwine the story of her hometown with the history of the world, braiding personal narratives with social mythologies. Hals’s formal training as a tapestry weaver is evidenced by her signature netted vessels and hanging sculptures that recall crochet lace, traditional basketry, and fishermen’s nets. After transitioning from textiles to fiber in the late 1980s, she began spinning and casting her signature forms from cotton and paper pulp. These womblike, volumetric shapes echo Asawa’s aesthetic vocabulary of transparency and negative space, suggesting a similar ethereal weightlessness.

Hals studied at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art among other institutions. Her work is in collections such as Zentrum Architektur Zürich; Museum of Decorative Art, Lausanne; the National Museum of Oslo, and the National Museum of Decorative Arts, Trondheim.

B. 1960, Gacharage, Kenya. Lives and works in San Antonio.

A trip to Mexico at 21 introduced Asawa to basket weaving—an experience that transformed her artistic practice. Kenyan artist Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga, however, learned the craft from watching her grandmother fashion baskets from fibers native to their village. Today, Gakunga blends traditional materials like the rope her grandmother spun from migiyo shrubs with unexpected elements like steel wire and mabati, a galvanized sheet metal used for roofing. Her metallic, crocheted wall-hangings emulate the pliancy and airy lightness most often attributed to textiles. While some recall tapestries and gossamer curtains, others seem to fall like lace or float like the hem of a dancer’s skirt. In her basket-inspired series, Gakunga interlaces wire with patterned fabrics and brilliant yarns to create amorphous vessels with striking, contemporary proportions.

Gakunga studied at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in exhibitions in the U.S., U.K., France, Brazil, and Poland. In 2013, October Gallery presented her first solo exhibition entitled “Ituĩka – Transformation.” In 2021, Gakunga’s sculpture, Wetereire – Waiting (2016), won the Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

B. 1972, Osaka. Lives and works in Berlin.