Nestled in a former factory in a residential-industrial area in the New York City neighborhood of Long Island City, The Noguchi Museum personifies that blend of art and nature which provides a serene, Zen-like retreat. Founded by Isamu Noguchi in 1985, the collection contains the artist’s estate and serves as a homage to his legacy. Here visitors can see an extensive assemblage of sculptures, models, drawings, and designs.

Born in Los Angeles in 1904 to a Japanese father and an Irish-American mother, Noguchi spent his early life in Japan. Over a lifetime of travel and exposure to varied artistic movements, his journey led to an original exploration of multiple art forms and crafts—from sculpture and landscape architecture to furniture and lighting design. Blending Eastern and Western aesthetics, he is celebrated for embracing organic forms, minimalism, a deep love of nature, and innovative use of natural materials such as granite, basalt, marble, steel, and bronze.

That Noguchi even established the museum—the first in the U.S. to focus on the work of a single, then-living artist—might have been considered haughty. But as Matthew Kirsch, Curator and Director of Research at the museum, points out, “Noguchi was a museum-goer himself. So, when institutions approached him for work, he saw their encyclopedic manner for showing art as unfortunate. He preferred to reveal an artist’s story, and not as a career chronology, but one that reverberated across different periods of process and a review of the history of sculpture itself.”

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY LESLIE NEWSOM RASCOE
WRITTEN BY STEPHEN DANDROW

This story appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of MILIEU.