NEW YORK, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- The Noguchi Museum featuring sculpture and design objects created by American modernist Isamu Noguchi has reopened after a two-year, $13.5 million renovation of its galleries and garden in New York's borough of Queens in time to celebrate the centennial of his birth.
The centennial already has been marked by the issuance of a series of five 37-cent U.S. postage stamps depicting aspects of Noguchi's work and a reissue of the artist's autobiography. The Whitney Museum in Manhattan is opening a retrospective exhibition in October that will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and Sapporo, Japan, is finally completing Noguchi's last major design, a public park.
The Noguchi Museum was opened by the artist in 1985, three years before his death, in a former photo-engraving plant built in the 1920s located across the street from the sculptor's Queen's home and studio. The museum building had deteriorated alarmingly over the years and lacked both heating and air-conditioning, so that it was open to visitors only from April to October.
Now that a climate-control system has been installed in the structurally reinforced building, the 27,000-square-foot museum will be open year round and visitors are expected to jump in number from 25,000 a year on average to 50,000. Many will visit nearby Queens museums such as the Museum for African Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and Socrates Sculpture Park.
The Noguchi Museum has new second-floor exhibition galleries and enlarged educational facilities, and storage capacity has been increased to accommodate the museum's 258-object collection and extensive archives. The peaceful sculpture garden with its "mystery fountain" trickling out of a sculpted rock has been repaved and replanted where necessary but the birch trees, bamboo, weeping cherry and Japanese pines have not be disturbed.
Having acquired the first space it has ever had for temporary exhibitions, the museum has reopened with a beautiful special installation designed by noted visual artist and theatrical designer-director Robert Wilson that will be on view through Oct. 3. It is titled "Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design," and is the first large-scale exhibition of Noguchi's work in New York in nearly 25 years.
This is a show of nearly 100 works that clearly illustrates Noguchi's genius for crossing disciplines and cultures, a reflection of his own dual heritage as son of a Japanese poet father and American writer mother. It includes examples of his abstract sculpture in stone and wood, some of it monumental in size, furniture designs for Knoll and Herman Miller Co., stage sets for choreographer Martha Graham, and designs for sculpture gardens, playgrounds and public spaces.
"Most people are aware of Noguchi's work without realizing it because many of his design objects, especially his paper Akari lamps from the 1950s, have been mass produced for decades," museum Curator Bonnie Rychlak told UPI.
"Because the exhibition makes connections among the various areas of Noguchi's work, it allows the museum, for the first time, to provide a fresh context for Noguchi's work and legacy," she added, noting that the show will travel to the Seattle Art Museum next June and to the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles in February 2006.
Rychlak, a former Noguchi assistant, has just completed plans for the next temporary exhibit opening this fall, "Noguchi and Graham." It will explore the unique creative collaboration between the sculptor and the choreographer, a partnership that lasted more than 30 years. Noguchi also worked with choreographers George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham.
For visitors who want to buy one of the lantern-like Akari lamps made of Japanese washi paper and bamboo ribbing, they are on sale in the museum's new shop along with examples of Noguchi's sleek modern furniture together with furniture and objects designed by Noguchi contemporaries Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. The museum also has a new bookshop and café.
Jenny Dixon, director of the museum, noted that care was taken to keep the museum as simple as Noguchi conceived it with white-painted brick walls, exposed ceiling beams, worn gray concrete floors and large industrial windows. To make a visit to the museum an intimate experience, there are few guards visible, signage is minimal and galleries are kept dark with the sculptural displays spotlighted.
"We want to refine, deepen and preserve the spirit of Noguchi, to give his work the diligence it deserves," Dixon said. "And that is not a blockbuster show experience."
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