Ruth Asawa and David Ireland inspire art in the Mission

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As far as artist Ruth Asawa’s daughter Aiko Cuneo knows, her mother didn’t know conceptual artist and sculptor David Ireland, even though they overlapped in San Francisco for several decades.

Asawa, who was born in 1926 and died in 2013, lived in Noe Valley. Ireland, who was born in 1930 and died in 2009, lived in the Mission. 

“I’ve been asked this question before,” Cuneo said. “If there was a connection, we haven’t found it yet. If you find one, please let us know.” 

While Asawa, the subject of a wildly popular retrospective currently at SFMOMA, has an international profile, Ireland is perhaps best known for turning his home at 500 Capp St. into an artwork, his contributions as a minimalist architect, and his influence as an art teacher and mentor.

Asawa and Ireland each left physical and relational legacies that continue to inspire and connect people who never knew them.  

Legacy is the theme of an intergenerational art project connecting the communities of Ruth’s Table, an arts nonprofit dedicated to serving older adults and people with disabilities, and 500 Capp St., the arts nonprofit and exhibition space established in Ireland’s former home in 2016.

Ruth’s Table is closely associated with the Bethany Center, the senior residence next door, while 500 Capp St. partners with City Studio, a youth arts-education program that began at San Francisco Art Institute.

For several weeks this summer, 13 Bay Area teenagers, ranging in age from 14 to 19, have been collaborating with Bethany Center residents in a two-part art project led by Amy Berk and Chris Treggiari, co-directors of City Studio, which is now based at 500 Capp St. 

Berk, director of education for 500 Capp St., said the teens spent two weeks “embedded” at Ruth’s Table: they participated in all the center’s sessions and workshops alongside the older regulars, building rapport.

Treggiari guided the teens in recording video histories of the elders who were asked to reflect on their legacies to San Francisco. Berk has been working with the students on silkscreens and building a wheeled, wooden monument to what they imagine their own San Francisco legacies will be. 

Saturday Aug. 2, at 4 p.m., the teens will push their monument from Ruth’s Table to 500 Capp St., about three minutes on foot, perhaps a little longer in parade mode. Once there, they will install their art piece and unveil their silkscreens and videos. The event at 500 Capp St. will run from their arrival to 5 p.m. 

Berk, who described the monument as still under construction, said it would include various San Francisco landmarks adorned with “three-dimensional objects that the teens are interested in and what they’ve heard from the elders. So, there’s gonna be a BART train, birds play a large role, Chinese lanterns, and, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. One of our students is an open-water swimmer so she’s bringing sand from Ocean Beach.” 

Locally, Asawa is also remembered for the imprint she left on San Francisco Unified School District arts education  and her many public art projects. The collaborative collage aspect of the City Studio teens’ monument is in the spirit of Asawa’s “San Francisco Fountain,” a sculpture that includes the work of more than 100 San Francisco schoolkids and members of her own family. 

She pioneered bringing in professional artists to teach in the schools, and cofounded SCRAP, the nonprofit that collects and repurposes materials for students, teachers, artists and crafters. Ruth’s Table, which was originally intended as a community space for people over 50, welcomes participants of all ages. 

At 500 Capp St., what Berk calls the teens’ “ode to San Francisco” will share the house with works by professional artists, including one of four pieces in Mildred Howard’s “Untold Histories/Hidden Truths” suite, which reimagines monuments to historical California men who engaged in racist subjugation of indigenous, enslaved and immigrant people. 

Howard’s “Junipero Serra Is Not My Father” (2025), a nine-foot-tall statue completely wrapped in blood-red jersey, stands in a boat, holding a cross in one hand and a model of a Spanish mission in the other.

Since it was installed on the building’s deck in mid-June, the Mission sun has bleached the figure to a shade approximating Lenten rose; the silt that’s settled in the jersey folds deepens the details.

The piece is meant as a critical interrogation of Serra’s legacy, but in showing how exposure changes an object’s nature, it also resonates with Ireland’s own creative approach.  He preserved and highlighted weathering, leaks, removals — even the scars of two major earthquakes — in the 1886 Italianate house he turned into an art project and lived in for more than 30 years.

Berk said she was thinking of Howard’s work and the impacts Asawa and Ireland left  when she and Treggiari came up with the idea for the teens’ legacy project. 

“David Ireland was an incredible, generous mentor and so good to his students,” Berk said. “We were friends until the end. I knew I wanted to bring teens to his house because it’s such a magical experience.” Howard also claimed Ireland as a dear friend and advisor. 

Berk, who was one of his students, said Ireland taught “intermittently” at the San Francisco Art Institute over several years. 

“David’s influence on the community resonates with Ruth’s,” she said. “Their dining room tables are similar, in that they collected community around them.”

Asawa donated her dining table — not just the site of family meals and dinner parties, but one of many workspaces in her home — to Ruth’s Table. Using floorboards from an old mansion, Ireland built a narrow, 163.5-inch-long dining table that is the centerpiece of 500 Capp St.

While Ireland’s home became his art, Asawa’s whole life seemed to be woven into her art. Cuneo, who with her twin, Xavier, was the oldest of Asawa and architect Albert Lanier’s six children, says that by the time they were seven, every sibling was helping with the house and their mother’s art projects. 

 “You can be a mom and you don’t have to just be, solo in the artist studio,” Cuneo said. “That’s another choice, but she wanted six children and she got them. She wanted six. It wasn’t like she had to go to her job and shut the door and don’t bother me. It’s like the doors were open. There were no doors half the time, you know. So, it was just sort of seamless.” 

Seamless, like some of the pieces Asawa was weaving while her children talked and rolled wire for her. Communing while doing has always been part of the Asawa family, and Ruth, who came from a farming family, brought that from her home into the world, Cuneo said. 

In conjunction with the Asawa retrospective, Cuneo has been holding workshops and presentations at SFMOMA and Ruth’s Table. On a Zoom call, she showed off the flowers the teens and elders made during a recent creative reuse workshop she led at Ruth’s Table. She’d assembled the 39 flowers into a single panel and is having it printed and turned into notecards for the participants. 

“They were all working together in the same big room, painting and drawing their flowers and chatting,” Cuneo said. “It was really interesting for the seniors to hear some of the conversations that the kids were having, and they enjoyed meeting each other, so that was the really wonderful part.” 

At 1 p.m. Saturday at Ruth’s Table, Cuneo will hold an open salt-dough workshop. This was the modeling medium for “San Francisco Fountain,” which also includes the handiwork of Cuneo, who was 20 at the time, and Ruth’s Japanese mother. 

When asked how she thinks of her mother’s legacy in this perilous time for arts, education and immigrants, Cuneo said, “[My mother] really wanted people of all ages to understand the joy of making art and that there are certain things you can’t control. You can’t control Donald Trump. That’s for sure. But you can control what you put on a piece of paper or what you build or what you write or how you dance or how you sing, how you make music.” 

Cuneo, who worked in schools for 35 years, said she knows what her mother meant. “She wanted [children] to have that experience because it makes them a stronger, richer person, just better at whatever they do.”