Asian American Art Initiative

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks) in 2020. These 233 masks, which originally hung on the exterior of Ruth Asawa’s family home in Noe Valley, have never been shown in their entirety outside their original context. After two years of conservation treatment and careful planning, they were mounted as part of the long-term installation, The Faces of Ruth Asawa, at the Cantor. This focused exhibition, curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, PhD, Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative, explores Asawa’s intimate relationship with clay and offers a new context with which to understand her diverse body of work.

August 6, 2025–July 5, 2026

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was a Japanese American artist and arts advocate who worked to integrate arts education into the standard curriculum of San Francisco’s public schools. Although Asawa is best known for her looped-wire sculptures, Archive Room: Ruth Asawa explores her lifelong dedication to arts activism through selected projects from the Alvarado School Arts Workshop curriculum, an artist-in-residence program she cofounded with architect and fellow parent Sally Woodbridge at Alvarado Elementary School in 1968. The teaching materials, workshops, and collaborative projects presented in this compact, single-gallery presentation explores Asawa’s belief that art is essential to cultivating a fuller sense of self.

September 17, 2025–January 25, 2026

The Cantor Arts Center presents Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, a career-spanning exhibition of the internationally renowned New York-based artist. For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) has been reframing South Asian visual histories through a contemporary feminist perspective. Sikander’s command of diverse media and traditions, from historical South Asian miniature paintings to digital animation, reveals a vibrant visual universe that reimagines the past for our present moment. Throughout her practice, she considers diasporic experiences, histories of colonialism, and Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics.