Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation is now open at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum until September 14, 2025. Pieces from the original second floor installations will return to their galleries for the first time in fifteen years, ahead of the museum’s 40th anniversary in 2025.
The reinstallation will include more than 60 works from the museum’s permanent collection, including Noguchi’s 1928 brass and wood sculptures. With many considered as personal breakthroughs, these pieces narrate the peaks and troughs of the artist’s six decade-long career.
Against Time is looks to The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Harry M. Abrams, Inc.,. 1987) instead of traditional wall labels. While it cannot reconstruct Noguchi’s exact vision for the galleries, the exhibition follows the footsteps of his meticulous arrangements, spotlighting work from the years leading up to his death in 1988.
The original installation presented a collection of pieces from before and after Noguchi’s move to this 10th Street studio in Long Island City in 1961. Thirteen years later, he purchased the former print engraving factory that would become the museum as it stands today. The first floor consisted of recent rock sculptures, while the second floor was an “exercise in looking backward”, an assiduous retrospective that explored the social role of art.
“His installations were less of a chronological retelling of his career than an inventory of the themes that continually threaded his work— transformation, mortality, vulnerability, weightlessness, erosion, humanity’s coexistence with nature— as well an implication that his many unrealized environmental, park, and garden projects were a well of ideas that he refined, adapted, and improved within later realized projects,”says curator and Director of Research Matthew Kirsch.
