If the hectic pace of city life is taking a toll on your summer, a half-day trip to Long Island City might be all that you need to reset your compass. The Noguchi Museum and garden, a half hour from midtown Manhattan, is an island of calm. It was the first museum in the country to be founded by a notable artist, Isamu Noguchi, in 1985, and was renovated and expanded a few years ago.

Left: a view of the garden. Right: Looking into The Well. Photos: Peggy Roalf.

The museum presents just about every aspect of Noguchi's incredible career, from his highly personal small pieces carved from stone; to his immense public projects, gardens and playgrounds around the world; to his stage designs for Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham; to his furniture and lighting designs. And more.

Born in Los Angeles to an American mother, Leonie Gilmour, a writer, and a Japanese father, the poet Yonejiro Noguchi, Noguchi lived in Japan until he was 13, when he was sent to school in Indiana. He went to New York in 1922 to be a pre-med student at Columbia, taking sculpture classes at night. In 1924 he dropped out of college and became a full-time artist, and from then on, made New York City his home base.

But for Noguchi, Japan was both his past and his future, providing him with a history of craftsmanship as well as aesthetic inspiration. He would return there constantly throughout his life to work, study, and live. The East-West bridge can be seen as the soul of his work, whether in the form of the small plaster study models currently on display at the museum, or a formal garden, such as the one he created in 1956 for the UNESCO Garden of Peace, in Paris.

In 1961, Noguchi set up a studio and living quarters in an old factory building in Long Island City. The chronology of his projects from then until his death in 1988 is breathtaking. He alternated between highly personal collaborations with Martha Graham and R. Buckminster Fuller, corporate projects, and site-specific sculptures and fountains on a colossal scale. But the intimate garden at the Noguchi Museum offers a window onto the spirit of a man who began his career as a carver in stone.

The garden, with its specimen trees, gravel beds and silver birches, is installed with some of Noguchi's most enduring pieces, including a version of The Well, from 1982 (above right), much like the one that can be seen at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here in the garden, as in the galleries, there are no districting text labels. Visitors may consult the diagrammatic guides with captions for the works on view, which are available in each space.

Some of the upcoming public programs this summer include music in the garden on Sunday, August 9^th and a discussion with the architects Jennifer Sage and Peter Coombs about their design for the renovated museum, on September 13^th. The small gift shop offers a large and selective colletion of books on Modernist and Surreal sculpture, architecture and design; Noguchi's furniture and lighting designs are also available for sale.

The Noguchi Museum is located at 32-37 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, NY. Shuttle bus service ($10 round trip; $5 one way) is available on Sundays, departing from Asia Society, Park Avenue at 70^th Street, New York, NY. Please visit the website for directions and information or call 718.204.7088.

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