Interlude - Ruth Asawa [1926-2013]

Copyright © Françoise Herrmann

Following a stretch at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Ruth Asawa Retrospective exhibit moves on to the New York City Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) from October 19, 2025 – Feb. 7, 2026. However, two of her best known public works, The Ghirardelli Square Fountain and the Grand Hyatt Hotel Fountain, remain in San Francisco,  California. The city* where she lived and worked all her life as an artist and community activist, raising six children with her husband, Albert Lanier, an architect.  

Best known for her suspended, knotted-wire sculptures that transparently defy gravity, and whose shadows are as interesting as the interconnected geometry of the pieces, Asawa’s commissioned San Francisco work was initially quite controversial. Indeed, the Ghirardelli Square Fountain depicts  two mermaids, one of which is breast-feeding her infant mermaid. The sculpture is named Andrea's Fountain, after one of Asawa's friends who was nursing at the time, and whose body she cast in plaster, to then better sculpt in wax, before casting in bronze. The fountain includes whimsical frogs that Asawa's own children also sculpted. The fountain was installed during the night to bypass conflict with the landscape architect who designed the square, and who wanted a more 'abstract' fountain design.  

Criticized as alternatively too decorative or too domestic, Asawa was also targeted for being Japanese-American, female, and from San Francisco, far from the East coast establishment. Nonetheless, Asawa was an enormously productive artist, and a beloved community activist in San Francisco. She found her voice, and her art work endured, celebrated both during her life time, and now posthumously. 

Below, an image of the landmark San Francisco Ghirardelli Square Andrea's Fountain, commissioned in 1968.  

Note

*Asawa and her husband chose to live in San Francisco, a city that would generously welcome her Japanese ancestry and bi-racial marriage. This choice came after forced internment in a barn at the Santa Anita Racetrack, at age 16 during world war II, together with thousands of other undesired people of Japanese descent, living in the United States. Despite the hardship, Asawa is said to have made the most of her internment, choosing to study painting for more than six hours a day under the supervision of Japanese Disney animators, who were also interned. In particular, she studied with Tom Okamoto, a landscape artist. Studying art contrasted with the farm work she had always performed with her family, and it confirmed her artistic talent. In Asawa's own words, regarding her internment: 

"I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am."

References

Ruth Asawa

https://ruthasawa.com

https://ruthasawa.com/life/ (time line)

SFMOMA

https://www.sfmoma.org/visit/

NYC MOMA

https://www.moma.org

Interlude - Amy Sherald at the SFMOMA

 Copyright © Françoise Herrmann

From November 16th, 2024, to March 9th, 2025, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is hosting the largest-ever collection of Amy Sherald oil-on-canvas paintings. The exhibit, titled Amy Sherald: American Sublime, displays nearly 50 portraits, from 2007 to 2024, of mostly everyday black Americans, consistent with her desire to engage viewers in a more complex understanding of American identity. Best known for her 2018 portrait of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, which usually hangs at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Amy Sherald directly addresses the notorious absence of black men, women, and children, in American portraiture. Her portraits are radiant, and only temporal in the way her subjects are dressed and positioned to tell a story.

A video of her work, included in the exhibit, shows the elaborate photoshoots and staging of her portraits, using actors. For example, the show’s poster--Any Sherald’s 2022 painting For love and for country, depicting two queer sailors kissing-- is directly reminiscent of the world-famous (1945) photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, titled V-J Day in Times Square. A portrait where, in fact, the 1945 kissing subjects were simply swapped and replaced by the two kissing queer black men, on a brilliant turquoise background. In Any Sherald's take, the two subjects, in the exact same position, are also completely oblivious of the world, as they claim their love. Love also, in 2022, of a more tolerant, red, white and blue country, shown with the blue striped shirt, red bandana and white sailor hat.

Amy Sherald identifies with a tradition of American realism represented by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. But her realism celebrates the sublime individual, vibrantly cloaked. Plus, Amy Sherald quotes extensively from such black literary geniuses as Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison for the titles* complementing her portraits. For example, from Morrison’s Beloved, she titles two of her 2015 portraits: Freeing herself was one thing, taking ownership of that freed self was another and Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.

After the San Francisco MOMA, the show moves on to the Whitney Museum, in New York City. 

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*Portrait titles from top to bottom: Grand Dame Queenie (2013), Precious jewels by the sea (2019), For love and for country (2022), Kingdom (2023), Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (2018), The bathers (2015), A god blessed land (Empire of Dirt) (2022), They call me Redbone but I'd rather be Strawberry Shortcake (2009), Untitled (2018), Breonna Taylor (2020), The boy with no past (2014), When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be (Self-imagined atlas)(2018).

References
Amy Sherald: American Sublime.
Exhibit at the SF MOMA, November 16 to March 9, 2024.
Chan, C. (Sept. 2024). Quiet Beauty: Amy Sherald’s American Art.  SF MOMA.  
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/quiet-beauty-amy-sheralds-american-art/ 

More from the scene of That Famous V-J Day Kiss in Times Square. Life Magazine. 
https://www.life.com/history/v-j-day-kiss-times-square/

Smith, R. (Sept. 12, 2019). Amy Sherald's shining second act. NYTimes. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/arts/design/amy-sherald-michelle-obama-hauser-wirth.html