By Gina Martinez
Long Island City’s Noguchi Museum is marking its 30th anniversary with a year-long celebration of the Japanese-American artist’s legacy. That celebration kicks off with the museum’s Spring Benefit May 19.
Isamu Noguchi, whose career went from the early 1920s until his death in 1988, made sculptures and public works but is perhaps best known for his modern furniture designs, most notably the Noguchi table – which combines a curved wooden base with a free-form glass top.
“Isamu Noguchi was a truly protean artist, ignoring the boundaries between art and design and fine and applied art long before this was widely accepted,” Jenny Dixon, director of the Noguchi Museum, said. “The museum he created 30 years ago may well be the truest embodiment of Noguchi’s multifaceted artistic practice. In celebrating this anniversary, we look not only inward and backward, at Noguchi and the museum, but also outward and ahead, with exhibitions that examine the ways in which some of the ideas and materials that were central to Noguchi’s work have been and continue to be explored by other artists.”
In honor of the anniversary, three major exhibitions will be presented throughout the year into 2016. The three exhibitions will be Isamu Noguchi at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Museum of Stones and Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony.
Isamu Noguchi at Brooklyn Botanic Garden runs Sept. 8 – Dec. 14.
A variety of Noguchi’s sculptures will be presened throughout the garden’s outdoor and indoor spaces.
Noguchi wanted his work to be as much a part of the natural physical universe as it was an expression of culture, Dixon said. How Noguchi’s work sits on the planet will be explored in this exhibition.
Museum of Stones will run Oct.7 – Jan. 10, 2016.
This major exhibition, which includes some 50 works by about 30 artists, looks at the ways in which artists have explored the place of rock and stone in human civilization and cultures across the globe. In addition to Noguchi, artists represented will include Mel Bochner, Bosco Sodi, Lawrence Weiner and many more.
Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony will run March 23 – July 24, 2016.
This will be the first exhibition at the Noguchi Museum that is taken from the work of a single artist other than Noguchi himself.
The exhibition will consist of a tea house situated in a garden, with all the elements of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. It will be accompanied by both a film featuring Sachs in the role of tea master and a tea ceremony manual.
In addition to the exhibitions, at the Spring Benefit May 19 the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award will be presented to Jasper Morrison, an English furniture designer, and Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect best known for the redesign of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
The awards recognize the spirit of innovation, global consciousness and Japanese American exchange that were core to Noguchi and his practice, Dixon said.
The Noguchi Museum is at 9-01 33rd Road in LIC. Phone (718) 204-7088 for more info.
