This post was to have been an announcement about the reinstallation of the Noguchi Garden Museum’s second floor to its configuration when the artist lived there, from 1961 to 1988. When looking around for some additional information, however, I came across an intriguing statement by independent curator Glenn Adamson, writing for Hyperallergic:

“The Noguchi Museum, in Long Island City, may be the only museum in America improved by not having a living soul in it. For it has a soul already — this place.” He goes on to say, “The short and long of it is that what Andy Warhol’s Empire did for cinema, Distance Noguchi does for online programming. In their sheer slowness, the films, which total about 75 hours all told, serve as a vivid departure from the norm, and a gentle provocation.” Above and below: Stills from Distance Noguchi, 2020, © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum

The 22 films were created by artist Nicholas Knight, working with curator Dakin Hart in response to the Corona Virus shutdown. Adamson concluded, “The enforced closure of his museum had brought it to a sort of ideal state. It’s common enough to hear this place described as a pilgrimage site, where one does not so much look at art as commune with it. But curator Hart goes further. ‘The museum doesn’t need you,’ he told [Adamson], with a smile. ‘It doesn’t want you. It has no more interest in you than the ocean does. Which is to say, none whatsoever.’”

To view the films, go here, and scroll down.

Following is the announcement of the reinstallation of the second-floor spaces:

Coinciding with The Noguchi Museum’s 40th anniversary in 2025, works from the Museum’s original second floor installation will return to those galleries for the first time since 2009. Against Time uses as its basis the catalogue The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), written by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) as a guide to works in the Museum in place of traditional wall labels, which was in turn used to define the Museum’s permanent collection after his death in December 1988. This original installation consisted of sculptures that had accumulated before and after Noguchi’s move to his 10th Street studio in Long Island City in 1961. Noguchi considered a number of these to be personal breakthroughs, works that represented significant turns and returns within his cyclical practice over the course of six decades. Above: Riverside Playground (Amphitheater Study), 1961–62; below left: Humpty Dumpty, 1973  

 The reinstallation will encompass more than 60 works, including examples of Noguchi’s first forays into abstraction with brass and wood sculptures dating from 1928, just after his short stint as an assistant in Constantin Brancusi’s studio in Paris, alongside three portrait busts that Noguchi made in the 1930s, a practice that Noguchi returned to intermittently out of financial necessity. A selection from Noguchi’s 1940s MacDougal Alley studio era will include interlocking sculptures in slate and marble (along with later bronze reproductions), experiments with lit elements concealed within molded magnesite which Noguchi called Lunars, and carved onyx and alabaster works. 

An array of Noguchi’s project models, rarely shown as a group, will include unrealized designs for monuments and memorials, and formative playground concepts with later models of realized indoor and outdoor environments. These will be paired with set elements from three of Noguchi’s enduring and transformative collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham, illustrating how these exercises in the partitioning and punctuation of space expanded outward. Below: Dance Platform for Martha Graham’s Embattled Garden, 1958

The sheer variety of materials and modes of sculpture and Noguchi’s fluid definition of its scope lend some truth to Noguchi’s half-joking estimation: “I’m older than most artists, and I’ve probably gone through, at some point, the stages that all artists eventually go through. So in a sense, I am the history of art today, in my own person.”

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City, NY Info