The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sep 24, 2017–Jan 28, 2018
Month: September 2017
Ruth Asawa: The Weightless Line
David Zwirner, New York, Sept 13 to October 21, 2017.
I’ve spent the afternoon in a forest made of wire.
Asawa’s signature hanging sculptures, those translucent, biomorphic lobes that seem to defy gravity. They don’t feel like “sculpture” in the traditional sense; they feel like drawings that decided to stand up.
The Geometry of a Shadow
The most mesmerizing thing isn’t just the wire itself, but the shadows they cast on the white gallery walls. Because the works are looped and nested, the shadows become secondary artworks. They look like cellular structures or ghosts of the pieces themselves.
Asawa once said she wanted to “enclose space without blocking it out,” and seeing these in person, you realize she achieved exactly that. They are there, but they are also empty.
Beyond the Wire
While the “baskets” get all the glory, the smaller room with her works on paper is also a revelation. I spent a long time looking at a piece made entirely from a “BMC” laundry stamp from her days at Black Mountain College. It’s a simple, repetitive mark that creates this undulating, textile-like pattern. You can see the DNA of her sculptures right there on the page, the obsession with the “economy of line” she learned from Josef Albers.
Notebook Thoughts:
- The Vibe: Surprisingly intimate for such a high-profile gallery. It felt like a “mini-museum” show.
- Key Takeaway: You don’t need to be loud to be powerful. These wires are thin, but they hold the entire room.
2026 Retrospective Note:
It’s wild to look back at this 2017 entry and remember how “new” this felt to the New York establishment. In 2017, this was David Zwirner’s first show after taking over her estate. It was a formal “re-introduction” of Asawa to the canon.
Fast forward to today, 2026, and Asawa is no longer an “overlooked” artist; she’s a cornerstone of 20th-century modernism. We’ve seen the massive MoMA retrospective now, and at SFMoMA and her prices have skyrocketed, but I still think back to this specific afternoon at Zwirner. It was the moment the art world finally stopped calling her a “craftsperson” and started calling her a master.
Nicola Hicks
Flowers Gallery 13 September to 27 October 2018
Kara Walker: The Most Astounding and Important Painting Show?
Sikkema Jenkins and Co, New York Sept 8 to Oct 21 2017
I walked into Sikkema Jenkins today expecting the usual sharp, clean edges of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, but what I found was something much more raw and chaotic.
The title of the show is a mouthful of 19th-century carnival barker bravado, but the work inside feels like a visceral rejection of the “blockbuster” expectations placed on her. Instead of paper cut-outs, the walls are covered in massive, gestural works using Sumi ink, oil stick, and collage on paper and linen. Pieces like U.S.A. Idioms and Christ’s Entry into Journalism are teeming with a kind of frantic, ink-splattered energy. Crowded scenes of protest, violence, and historical ghosts that feel like they were exorcised onto the page. There is a specific kind of “tiredness” mentioned in the press release (a fatigue with being a “role model” or a “voice”) and you can feel that weight in the brushstrokes. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and brilliant because it refuses to be polite or easily consumable. It’s like reading someone’s most private, feverish late-night sketches, only magnified to a monumental scale.