Ruth Asawa Reviewed by Peter Hartlaub
September 2025
To appreciate the best details of artist Ruth Asawa’s “San Francisco Fountain,” you have to be a little bit of a voyeur. That’s what I’m thinking as I shine my phone light, a camera flash and finally the long flexible neck of a Bic barbecue lighter inside the credit card-sized bay window of a Victorian home that’s part of the bronze Union Square sculpture. I’m trying to get a better look at a secret diorama hiding inside. Asawa would have loved this scene. It was her idea to create a fountain in 1973 with so much detail, so many artists and so many cheeky detours. Even 52 years later, every visit guarantees a new surprise.“I’m discovering new things all the time,” says Paul Lanier (pictured above), Asawa’s youngest son, who was 12 when the fountain was built in 41 pieces in the family’s Noe Valley back yard. The SFMOMA’s acclaimed “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” exhibition ends on Sept. 2. (Next stop, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) But Asawa has public art throughout the city; there’s a free tour on her artist web site. And her Union Square fountain is a great place to begin.