Ruth Asawa: A 100th Birthday Celebration

Celebrate one hundred years of the pathbreaking artist Ruth Asawa! This special evening will feature a conversation with scholar Anne Cheng, writer and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki, and artist Harmony Hammond, as they explore Asawa’s life and practice and contemplate points of connection with their own work. After short presentations, there will be a roundtable discussion moderated by Cara Manes, Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and organizer of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, on view until February 7. We will end the evening with a birthday reception and toast to Ruth Asawa and the final week of this landmark exhibition.

Anne Anlin Cheng is the Louis W. Fairchild ’24 Professor of English at Princeton University and author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (2000); Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (2000); Ornamentalism (2018), and most recently, a book of personal essays Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority (2024). She was the 2023-2024 Scholar in Residence at MoMA. Her work can also be found in journals such as The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international recognition for their integration of issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms. She is now Professor Emerita of English Language & Literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.

Harmony Hammond is an artist, writer, and curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she attended the University of Minnesota from 1963–67, before moving to New York in 1969. She was a co-founder of A.I.R., which became the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York during the Women’s Liberation Movement (1972), and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson, from 1989–2006. Her pathbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History was published by Rizzoli in 2000, and Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader is forthcoming from Duke University Press, this July. She had work in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and a solo exhibition of new paintings opens on June 5 at Alexander Gray Associates in New York City.

This program is organized by MoMA’s Department of Research Programs and Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Questions? Please contact [email protected].

Accessibility

FM assistive-listening devices (headsets and neck loops for T-coil compatibility) are available for sound amplification.

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.