Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation
Text and photograph by Monika Hankova
“A museum is, I suppose, a repository against time…there is a semblance of eternity, a sense of permanence that is implied by a museum, and a removal from time’s passage.” – I. Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), a renowned American artist, born in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet and an American writer, started his career in Paris, working briefly as a sculptor for Constantin Brancusi in 1927. At the beginning of the 30s, Noguchi moved to New York, where he continued his sculptural work while venturing also into landscape, furniture, and light design. The author of the famous Red Cube (1968) and the Sunken Garden (1961–1964), both located in Lower Manhattan, is mostly known for creating sensitive sculptural environments.
Noguchi, a frequent and enthusiastic visitor of museums, had a critical approach towards museum institutional spaces. He questioned and criticised traditional airless, white-walled museum galleries, and had a vision of creating a different museum where he could show his own work in a distinct environment. In 1985, following this idea, Isamu Noguchi opened the Museum in Long Island City, Queens, along with a concrete pavilion he built together with Shoji Sadao (1927–2019). Noguchi wanted to “show his life’s work in a context essential to his vision.”
The two-story Noguchi Museum is housed in a repurposed red brick industrial building, originally the photoengraving factory from 1920s. The Museum with a sublime sculpture garden has become the first single-artist museum founded by an artist in their own lifetime. Some of the most interesting features of the building itself are the open sky, so-called “floating” galleries, and a sensitive choice of plants and outdoor sculpture pieces in the Japanese garden, which was used as a model for how sculpture should relate to its surroundings. Detail-oriented and working with different materials, Noguchi created an environment where “nature, architecture, weather, light, and sound stimuli might also enter into a visitor’s experience.” Indeed, the Zen-like vibe of the indoor spaces and, foremost, of the garden is almost palpable and deeply comforting. And, when the sun rays hit the building and casting beams of light penetrate inside the galleries, it feels as if they create another layer of harmony to Noguchi’s poetic artworks.
Against Time show assembles the works that can be seen as a representation of Noguchi’s museum experiment, yet adapted for the Museum’s current setting. Noguchi’s catalogue The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (1987), published one year before his death, provides the framework for Against Time. The reinstallation is reimagining groups of sculptures according to archival photographs that document how Isamu Noguchi himself arranged and rearranged his works in different constellations when the Museum was still an active experiment.
For example, the installation in the Area 8 on the first floor, originally arranged as a semi-permanent environment, is a variation on Noguchi’s original selection for this specific area, once located right above. On view here is Slide Mantra (1985), the centerpiece of his exhibition What Is Sculpture? for the US Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale. In the same space, there’s also a sublime, white Seravezza marble piece called Woman (1969). A colorful wooden piece Dance Platform for Martha Graham’s Embattled Garden (1958) is also on view on the first floor. It’s a testament to an artistic collaboration with an icon of a modern dance, the choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991). They worked together to create an innovative set design for more than twenty of Martha’s intriguing and revolutionary dance performances.
The second floor galleries feature changing exhibitions drawing mostly from the Noguchi’s archive. Presented are some pieces from Noguchi’s early periods when he explored the ceramics in Japan in the 30s (and again in the 50s). Examples of his early practice of portraiture are Tsuneko-san, Uncle Takagi, and José Clemente Orozco, the Mexican muralist who visited New York City in 1931. On the second floor, there are to be found also delicate alabaster pieces, such as Leda (1942) or The Kiss (1945).
The “floating” galleries (Areas 9 and 10) located above Area 1 have the sensation of floating, thus the name. Besides different combinations of smaller-scale works, they also accommodated some of Noguchi’s largest art pieces, namely those made of granite, basalt or marble. These were created at studios in Japan and Italy, and were too heavy to be transport ed and shown in temporary exhibition settings.
Against Time is creatively reimagining the spaces that have since the 80s been redesigned through multiple renovations and other necessary modifications. The current reinstallation illustrates the cyclical nature of Noguchi’s artworks, be it certain materials and techniques he used or recurring philosophical themes in his work. During his life-long career, Noguchi addressed mainly these topics: “transformation, mortality, vulnerability, weightlessness, entropy, erosion, humanity’s coexistence with nature”, and all of these concepts are very visible within the current setting of the artworks in the original gallery spaces.
A visit to The Noguchi Museum is a great weekend trip for the whole family. The Museum’s Long Island City location can be easily reached by ferry (it takes about 45 min. from Wall Street on the Astoria route). I recommend to follow the visit of the Museum with a walk through the Socrates Sculpture Park located nearby, and to make a stop at Château Le Woof, a tiny “dog” cafe on Vernon Boulevard, which offers not only treats for your four-legged friend, but also a great coffee, seasonal pastries, and organic wine.
Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation is on view until September 14, 2025.