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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.

Through the efforts of Jonathan Laib, then working at Christie’s before moving to David Zwirner gallery, a market was built, almost top down, for Asawa’s Möbius-like wire objects, which create forms with both positive and negative space. (It’s almost impossible to tell where the insides begin and the outsides end.) But, it turns out, there was a great deal more to Asawa than the hanging sculptures the market discovered.

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In 2023, the Whitney mounted a show of Asawa’s drawings that revealed both her intense interest in organic forms, which fit with the structures we had come to know from the market, and her somewhat uncharacteristic attraction to flora. This new retrospective brings together the many different sides of Asawa’s art and reveals a unity of purpose expressed in seemingly different forms. Here we can see how the structures reflect patterns inherent in nature, as expressed in both her drawings and her abstract sculptures.

By late 1949, things at Black Mountain had begun to deteriorate, with the Alberses and other teachers resigning. Asawa joined her soon-to-be husband in San Francisco, and in the 1950s, even while she was having six children, her sculptures attracted institutional, gallery, and commercial interest, though she decided against mass-producing “looped-wire baskets” for decorators in favor of exploring the possibilities of her art. Asawa’s work was shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1955, ’56, and ’58, then in a solo show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 1960. But her interest in drawing and moving beyond the looped-wire sculptures caused a rift with her gallery, which she left in 1961.

The sheer variety of forms that Asawa was able to imagine and execute is beguiling in its own right. But the fact that she found this seemingly endless realm of possibilities to be confining is just a hint at what the MoMA show has been able to gather. In addition to numerous drawings of flowers and plants, there are cast sculptures and masks, as well as the carved redwood doors from the Lanier family home in Noe Valley.

In the late 1960s, Asawa’s work shifted in two different directions. For one, she began to develop a “tied-wire” method of bundling and dividing wire strands into snowflake-like forms; in what to me is the most gratifying room in the exhibition, the resulting sculptures fuse Asawa’s fractal replication of nature into a form that’s both aesthetically exciting and seems to have near-infinite possibilities for expression. Also, in 1968, Asawa created the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in her children’s elementary school, which eventually expanded to multiple San Francisco schools, where Asawa and her friend Buckminster Fuller collaborated again. For the rest of her career, Asawa would spend more and more of her time engaged in community art projects and education.

Even with the great variety of work presented in the MoMA show, one still gets the sense that there is more to Ruth Asawa’s art than can be absorbed in a major museum retrospective. It will be interesting to see whether the substantial space and emphasis this show places on the tied-wire works will lead her market to revalue examples of them, or whether interest might gravitate toward some of the other bodies of her work displayed here. In the meantime, the complexity and subtlety of Asawa’s creations make this the kind of exhibition you will want to visit more than once. Each time, you are sure to see something new. I know I will be back.