In the 1940s, artist Isamu Noguchi experimented with a series of “lunar landscapes,” embedding lights in undulating magnesite cement. While some were freestanding sculptures, three were site-specific pieces installed in two buildings and a boat. This month, the only one of these architectural projects to survive was revealed in a U-Haul store in St. Louis, Missouri.
Isamu Noguchi
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Drinking Tea with Tom Sachs
I’m eating a single Ritz cracker, its underbelly embellished with a creamy wave of peanut butter.
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A Tactile Tour of Isamu Noguchi and Martha Graham’s 1940s Dance Sets
For over three decades, Martha Graham danced her most compelling choreography on and around the abstract sculpture of Isamu Noguchi.
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Traversing the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with Isamu Noguchi
Eighteen sculptures by Isamu Noguchi are dispersed across the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens just as late summer is turning to fall.
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The History of NYC’s First Nine Landmark Parks
On a July morning, at the tender age of five, I watched the building next to my Bronx tenement capitulate to the blows of a wrecking ball.
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The Postminimal Zen of Boxed-Up Noguchis
If you visit the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City this summer, someone at the front desk will let you know that the institution is currently undergoing renovation and they regret that all the art in the garden is temporarily off view.
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Parsing the Collective Design Fair’s Peculiar Objects
Visiting Collective Design amid all of Frieze Week’s art fairs is doubly refreshing: it’s an unabashed celebration of beautiful objects and you can touch (almost) all of them.
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The Images and Stories of Japanese American Internment
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 7, 1941, the FBI started arresting a number of first-generation Japanese Americans on the West Coast.
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From Calder to Kruger, the New Whitney Museum’s First Show
The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum is not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
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Fred Wilson on Isamu Noguchi’s Multifaceted Modernism
On a dismal, rainy Saturday in Manhattan, as dirty snow slowly melted to reveal winter’s detritus outside, the cheerful, humorous, and ever approachable Fred Wilson led a group of gallerygoers through Isamu Noguchi’s Variations.
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The Indian Observatories That Inspired Noguchi’s Sculptures
Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi’s highly formal approach to design borrows cues from varied sources, including architecture, sculpture, and photography.
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For Your Next Roadtrip: A Guide to America’s Art Parks
The sculpture park is a relatively recent art destination, really flourishing in the 1960s and 70s when artists explored the use of the American landscape as a medium for public art. Yet now the United States is dotted with these little art oases, from those that sprawl over rural acres to those embedded in the urban environment.