• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

The House That Ruth Built

A sweeping MoMA retrospective shows the full scope and ambition of Ruth Asawa, a titanic talent who studied with luminaries like Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, yet wasn’t fully discovered until her death in 2013. As the art world approaches her centennial, the appreciation is still growing.

Ruth Asawa
You can easily understand how Ruth Asawa’s biography made her very attractive as a rediscovered artist more than a decade ago. Just about everything in her experience—as a child of immigrants, a woman creating art from nontraditional materials, and a wife and mother, community organizer, and arts educator—militated against her becoming a recognized artist. Photo: Laurence Cuneo/© 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Courtesy of David Zwirner
Marion Maneker
October 28, 2025

Join Puck to listen to this article

It’s been only a dozen years since Ruth Asawa’s radical art was recovered from near-obscurity, but the new comprehensive retrospective that just opened at the Museum of Modern Art makes it feel like she’s been at the center of the art world forever. With 15 different examples of her ineffable, crocheted-wire hanging sculptures having achieved auction prices over $1 million—including one that sold for nearly $5.4 million and three others that hit prices above $4 million—it can be easy to forget that as recently as 2013, the artist’s work had not broken through to most art world denizens.