You may have seen Ruth Asawa’s delicate wire sculptures, the work most recognizable as hers, in the lobby of the de Young Museum’s tower. Or maybe you’ve visited the Cantor Arts Center’s collection of 233 ceramic masks, which the artist made in her Noe Valley home, of family and friends such as Buckminster Fuller and Anna Deavere Smith. (Asawa’s children would sometimes come home from school and find people lying on the floor, their faces covered in plaster.) Perhaps you were in New York during the fall of 2023 or the winter of 2024 to see the show of her drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The prolific Asawa also made public art, like the fountain at Ghirardelli Square of two mermaids with turtles, frogs and lily pads, and the memorial near the San Jose Federal Building commemorating the incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American residents of California during World War II — including Asawa and her family.

Now, fittingly since Asawa dedicated herself to the arts in San Francisco, you’ll have the opportunity to view the whole spectrum of the remarkable artist’s decades of work when Ruth Asawa: Retrospective opens this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA received a $1.5 million grant from Google.org to support the retrospective — the largest single corporate grant for an exhibition that the museum has ever been given. The grant means the museum will be able to offer free community days, symposiums, events and art workshops.