The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum has announced a new exhibition, Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation, which will be on view from August 28, 2024, to September 14, 2025. Curated by Matthew Kirsch, the showcase will feature a specific selection of Noguchi’s sculptures and project models from the museum’s permanent collection ahead of its 40th anniversary in 2025.
The exhibition is based on The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), the catalog that documented all of the museum’s works instead of traditional wall labels. Notably, the binding was used to mark the museum’s permanent collection following Noguchi’s death in December 1988.
The original installation housed a number of breakthrough pieces from before and after Noguchi moved to his 10th Street studio in Long Island City in the ’60s. 13 years after purchasing the studio, Noguchi bought the print engraving factory across the street and transformed the space into his early days museum. On the first floor, he presented his most recent sculptures; and on the second floor, he exhibited an “exercise in looking backward” that essentially told the history of his practice.
“Noguchi intended for these second floor galleries to give context for the environment that he created with this Museum,” Kirsch said in a statement. “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.”
The museum’s forthcoming reinstallation will include more than 60 works, such as Noguchi’s first abstract wood and brass sculptures, his portrait busts, slate marble creations and more. Take a first look at the featured pieces above.
