A major survey of Ruth Asawa opens at Fondation Beyeler in Basel/Riehen on 18 October and runs to 10 January 2027, bringing her wire sculptures, paintings and drawings to Europe. Asawa worked across six decades while raising six children, campaigning for arts funding and teaching children in the San Francisco Bay Area. Wider recognition came largely after her death in 2013, aged 87, with exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017, and postage stamps honouring her in 2020. A large retrospective that opened in San Francisco last year has since travelled to New York and Spain. Asawa also worked as a designer. While studying at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946 to 1949, she borrowed a rubber stamp from the college laundry room and used it to make patterns on pillowcases and newsprint. A few years later she made a print for the furniture company Englander, was paid 50 dollars and left uncredited. In 1959 she applied for a patent for a wall covering first made from folded paper and then in vacuum-formed plastic, a move suggested by Buckminster Fuller, one of her teachers. Asawa was equally committed to arts education. In 1968 she co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, which brought artists and gardeners into San Francisco public schools, lobbied politicians as a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, and helped open the city's first public arts high school in 1982, later renamed in her honour. Her advocacy was rooted in her own history: born in Southern California in 1926, the fourth of seven children of Japanese immigrant parents, she was incarcerated with her family by the United States government during the Second World War. While held at Santa Anita Racetrack in California, the teenager took drawing lessons from three fellow detainees who worked as animators for Disney. Public art mattered to her as well, with commissions including the San Francisco Fountain, the steel wheel Aurora on the Embarcadero and the Japanese American Internment Memorial in San Jose from 1994.