The PTSA is immensely grateful to the contemporary and legacy artists of the internationally renowned David Zwirner Gallery who have contributed major works of art to benefit Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, to honor Ruth Asawa’s passionate advocacy for arts education in San Francisco’s public schools.
Ruth Asawa worked for decades to bring public arts education to school children in San Francisco. Inspired by her arts education at Black Mountain College, she served on the San Francisco Arts Commission, established the Alvarado School Art Workshop that has evolved into the wide-reaching elementary and middle school arts education program SFartsED, and finally in 1982 achieved her dream of establishing a multi-disciplinary public arts high school in San Francisco.
David Zwirner is a leading contemporary art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. Representing more than seventy artists and estates, the gallery is known for presenting innovative, singular, and pioneering exhibitions across a wide range of media and genres. Active in both the primary and secondary markets, David Zwirner has played a key role in shaping the careers of many of today’s most influential artists and has maintained long-term representation of a wide-ranging, international group of artists.
The Estate of Ruth Asawa has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017.
Katherine Bernhardt
Untitled, 2025
Acrylic on paper
29 7/8 x 22 1/4 inches (75.9 x 56.5 cm)
Signed and dated verso
Katherine Bernhardt’s (b. 1975) boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. Having gained prominence in the early 2000s for her spirited depiction of celebrities and models, Bernhardt later developed her now-signature “pattern paintings,” which juxtapose an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs—tacos, coffee makers, toilet paper, cigarettes, E.T., Garfield, Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther—within flat, expansive fields of exuberant color.
Katherine Bernhardt’s boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most energetic painters working today. Her trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants, and the democratizing surfaces of her canvases work without illusion, perspective, logical scale shifts, or atmosphere. With Bernhardt’s blunt yet lyrical approach, each painting has the feel of a complete thought that engages rich and raucous free association.
In 2025, David Zwirner presented Sidewalk Chalk, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Katherine Bernhardt at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Featuring Bernhardt’s signature lively brushwork and vibrant palette, the works in this presentation continue to expand the artist’s unique visual lexicon, which culls from an irreverent pop vernacular as well as her own life and the broader culture. To create her works, the artist first draws on upright canvases with spray paint, after which she lays them on the floor to apply acrylic paint thinned out with water. Here she focuses on newer motifs such as Lucky Charms cereal marshmallows and sticks of butter, which are playfully combined with iconic imagery from her oeuvre, including the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster, the Pink Panther, and Garfield.
The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide. Work by the artist is found in prominent public and museum collections worldwide.
© Katherine Bernhardt. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Alice Neel
Light, 1983
Lithograph on paper
38 x 27 inches (96.5 x 68.6 cm)
Edition 9 of 175, 25 AP, 30 HC
Signed, dated, and numbered recto
Printed by Atelier Ettinger
Published by Eleanor Ettinger, Inc.
Alice Neel (1900–1984) is widely regarded as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century. As the avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s renounced figuration, she developed her signature approach to the human body. Working from life and memory, Neel painted writers, poets, artists, activists, family, friends, and others around her with unfazed accuracy, honesty, and compassion.
While Neel’s primary medium was painting, the artist worked with master printers to make a number of prints in the 1970s and 1980s, creating works that feature many of her recurring subjects.
Light relates to one of Neel’s last large still lifes, made at her summer cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey. The work demonstrates a continuing exploration of the relationship between realism and abstraction. Large areas of the composition move between two and three dimensions, and the shadow cast onto the floor and wall appears to reach out of the picture plane toward the viewer.
© The Estate of Alice Neel
Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner
R. Crumb
The Nightmare (sepia), 1970
Offset lithograph on paper
21 x 24 1/8 inches (53.3 x 61.3 cm)
Edition 29 of 75
Signed, titled and numbered recto
Published by One Step Beyond, New York
Instrumental in the formation of the underground comics scene in the 1960s and 1970s, R. Crumb (b. 1943) has helped challenge and expand the boundaries of the graphic arts and redefined comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms.
Widely circulated, often celebrated, Crumb’s published imagery, such as his comic strips Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Keep on Truckin’, offers a mordant satirical critique of modern society, directly addressing political disillusionment, the never-ending battles between “squares” and bohemians, racial and gender stereotypes, sexual fantasies and fetishes, and the absurdities of social convention and conformity—themes the artist also often explores through disturbing but hilariously abject self-caricature that dramatizes incidents in his own life and surroundings.
The present lithograph was published by One Step Beyond in New York. The imagery relates to a drawing by Crumb that reimagines The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli in his signature satirical style. Here, Crumb renders the slumbering female figure of Fuseli’s painting in characteristically exaggerated fashion, while the incubus looming over her is replaced by the Snoid, one of Crumb’s best-known characters, who is often portrayed as an impertinent sexual deviant.
© Robert Crumb, 1970
Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner
Scott Kahn
Point House, Moon, 2020
Archival inkjet print on paper
22 x 23 7/8 inches (55.9 x 60.6 cm)
Edition 1 of 200
Signed, titled, and numbered recto
Printed by Rayographix, Chatham, New York
Rooted in his everyday life and experiences, American artist Scott Kahn’s (b. 1946) enigmatic landscapes, portraits, and dreamscapes blend real and surreal elements. The artist has remained committed to a figurative mode of expression over the course of more than five decades, using a distinctive formal language to achieve a nuanced and poetic rendition of the simultaneous splendor and mundanity of the world around him. His surfaces are meticulously constructed according to precise geometries and chromatic and spatial relationships.
Rooted in his everyday life and experiences, American artist Scott Kahn’s (b. 1946) enigmatic landscapes, portraits, and dreamscapes blend real and surreal elements. The artist has remained committed to a figurative mode of expression over the course of more than five decades, using a distinctive formal language to achieve a nuanced and poetic rendition of the simultaneous splendor and mundanity of the world around him.
His surfaces are meticulously constructed according to precise geometries and chromatic and spatial relationships, wherein the artist employs perspective and light to establish an illusory sense of depth that underscores the resonances imparted by the recurring cast of people, places, and symbols.
Kahn’s works evidence his individual point of view while opening out onto universal themes, offering viewers a conduit through which to access a wide range of emotions.
The moon appears throughout Kahn’s body of work, frequently in the background of his paintings as a sort of omen for the scene laid out beneath. Point House, Moon belongs to a group of works that focus on the full moon, with its myriad connotations, as the central compositional element.
© Scott Kahn. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Marcel Dzama
Under for opening eyelids of the moon, 2021
Fourteen-color lithograph on Rives BFK paper
28 1/2 x 21 3/8 inches (72.4 x 54.3 cm)
Edition 50 of 75, 15 AP, 4 PP, 3 HC, 1 BAT
Signed, dated, and numbered recto
Printed by Derriere L’Etoile Studios, New York
Published by Utopia Editions
Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama (b. 1974) has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art historical and contemporary influences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.
The present print is from a group of works that expand on Dzama’s interest in travel and nature, two themes that have become increasingly prevalent in his art. Many of these works were initially inspired by photographs Dzama took in Morocco, Mexico, and Fire Island, New York, places he traveled before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Dzama incorporates elements of the photographs into the world of his art, resulting in works that mix tropical imagery, depictions of leisure and play, and bright colors with illustrations of masked and mysterious characters, as well as dancers, wild animals, and hybrid figures inspired by mythic, biblical, and literary subjects.
For Dzama, these fantastical compositions of familiar yet far-off, enchanted worlds respond, in part, to the universal experience of isolation during the pandemic, and a sense of wanderlust that many experienced while in lockdown.
“This lithograph…was directly inspired by Dzama’s travels immediately before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The figures…represent the virus looming in the distance… The anthropomorphized moon recalls Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902)….”
© Marcel Dzama / Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Under for opening eyelids of the moon by Dzama is an excellent example of mythology at its most personal. It’s clear that the best time to avoid sunburn is by the light of the full moon.
Within these selected works on paper, Under directly connects to Scott Kahn’s Point House, Moon, in evening, and the decisive render of afternoon’s sharp shadow depicted in Neel’s Light.
Though all works were selected independent of one another, by the artists or their estates, their through line is a sensitive but finite one.
Day and night, our most basic measure, reveal their rituals, whether in Crumb’s Nightmare, or Cookie Monster’s midnight snack in Bernhardt’s Untitled.
We like to think of this in a 24 hour cycle, a day, represented through the hundred year eyes of modern masters and gifted in honor of Asawa.
Thank you.