Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures are in museums now, but her bronze flowers and watercolors keep surfacing at auction

While her wire sculptures sit in museum collections, a recurring cast-bronze flower and a run of watercolors show just how uneven the rest of Asawa's market has become.

By LiveAuctioneersSeptember 14, 2026

Ruth Asawa ‘Untitled (Flower)’ cast bronze relief — Above: Ruth Asawa's ‘Untitled (Flower)’ cast bronze relief sold for $8,500 plus buyer's premium at Rago, Lambertville, in June 2026. Image courtesy of Rago Arts and Auction Center and LiveAuctioneers.

NEW YORK, NY — Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is best known for the hanging sculptures of looped wire that made her name, delicate forms that are today mostly museum property. Two other strands of her work still circulate at auction, though: a cast bronze flower relief and a broad run of watercolors whose results are far less consistent. One edition of the flower relief, cataloged simply as Untitled (Flower), has become something of a recurring lot. Cast in bronze rather than modeled as a one-off, it exists in multiple examples, and each new appearance tends to bring a four-figure result. A recent one sold for $8,500 plus the buyer's premium in June 2026 at Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, New Jersey. Asawa's path to becoming an artist began in hardship. In 1942, her family was among the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned along the Pacific coast. They were first held at the Santa Anita racetrack stables, where artists from Walt Disney's studio led drawing classes for internees, before being relocated to a camp in Rohwer, Arkansas. Her education resumed at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied under Josef Albers. In 1945 and again in 1947, she traveled to Mexico, where basket-makers taught her a looping and crocheting technique she later carried into wire, turning it into something nobody had used it for before. She spent the rest of her life in San Francisco, where she also became a forceful advocate for arts education. In 1982, she helped found a public high school for the arts near the city's cultural center; it was renamed Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. That same year, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee awarded her a Bachelor of Fine Arts, more than fifty years after she had been denied her teaching certificate as a student. Looking back on the internment decades later, Asawa said: "I hold no hostilities for what happened. I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am."

The watercolors bear that same watchfulness for natural form, and the results have been anything but uniform. A watercolor of a purple iris made $6,250 plus the buyer's premium in November 2025 at Neely Auction in Stuart, Florida, against an estimate of just $400 to $600 — more than ten times the low figure.

Ruth Asawa ‘Untitled (WC. 250, Pink Flowers)’ watercolor — ‘Untitled (WC. 250, Pink Flowers),’ a 1988 watercolor, sold for $7,000 plus buyer's premium at Clars, Oakland, in June 2024. Image courtesy of Clars Auction Gallery and LiveAuctioneers.

Other results have landed closer to expectations. Untitled (WC. 250, Pink Flowers), a 1988 watercolor, sold for $7,000 plus the buyer's premium in June 2024 at Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland, California — right at the bottom of its $7,000 to $10,000 estimate.

An untitled Ruth Asawa watercolor on paper — An untitled watercolor on paper sold for $3,200 plus buyer's premium at Lucky's International Auction House, Miami, in August 2025. Image courtesy of Lucky's International Auction House and LiveAuctioneers.

A third watercolor, untitled, sold for $3,200 plus the buyer's premium in August 2025 at Lucky's International Auction House in Miami, Florida, against a wide estimate of $1,600 to $12,000. Other Asawa watercolors, not pictured here, have sold below their estimates entirely, one for $900 and another for $1,400, both in 2025. The wire sculptures have mostly gone to museums for good, although one did surface in 2024 and sold for $115,000 plus the buyer's premium at Rago. The bronze flower and the watercolors are still turning up in sales, and on recent evidence, buyers haven't yet settled on what some of it might be worth.