The work of artist Ruth Asawa, who died in 2013, is back in the spotlight with a major traveling exhibition now in San Francisco.

It's a celebration of her work, but also her extraordinary life.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

They are large, looped wire sculptures hanging from the ceiling.

They can look like human bodies or shapes from nature.

And grouped together, they play off one another through shadows and light.

The works of Rutha Sauer come in many sizes and also many forms, including paintings and drawings,

clay masks and bronze sculptures of hands and feet.

Really anything could be a viable material for art for Asawa.

What does that tell you about her? I mean, as an artist, as a creative person.

That she was incredibly open. She had a very open, experimental, kind of expansive vision of what art could be.

Janet Bishop is co-curator of Ruth Asawa retrospective, now at S.F. Malma, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

More than 300 works from the 1940s into the 2000s.

To me, she is absolutely one of the most accomplished artists of the 20th century.

There's even an installation evoking the living room of the San Francisco home where Asawa worked

and where she and husband Albert Lanier raised six children.

One of them, Paul Anir, himself an artist, lives there today and recalls

his mother constantly making and playing with materials and forms.

She would love that word to play.

She did like that. She used that word?

Yes. She would say play and experiment with the work.

And maybe if one piece came out really great, she wouldn't copy it and do it again, but

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