Ruth Asawa was a beloved supporter of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and an exemplar of civic engagement throughout the Bay Area. She relocated to San Francisco in 1949 after completing her studies at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina. Asawa worked in a variety of media, and her pioneering artistic practice moved freely between sculpture, paintings, drawings, and printmaking. Community-building also became intertwined with her artistic practice, and she was a tireless advocate for public art education. In anticipation of the new de Young building, Asawa was invited to create a permanent installation for the lobby of the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Education Tower. She selected a gift of 15 of her most significant sculptures, and her installation has been on view since the new building opened in 2005. Asawa’s installation features fine examples of the artist’s signature technical innovations in crocheted and tied-wire sculpture. She developed her undulating, crocheted forms by adapting traditional basketry techniques she learned from local artisans while visiting Toluca, Mexico, in 1947. This experience prompted Asawa to use wire to draw lines in three dimensions, creating complex, interpenetrating forms that incorporated the surrounding space, shadows, and light. Asawa’s tied-wire pieces grew from her interest in studying and re-creating the complex growth patterns of a desert plant: “In trying to draw it and following the tangle of the branches, I just decided that maybe I should…try to make it….Then I began to see all of the possibilities” (Asawa and Lanier 1980, 132).