Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi made sculpture, gardens, playgrounds, paper lamps and more than twenty sets for Martha Graham, and spent his life being told he belonged to neither of the countries he came from. He was born in Los Angeles to an American writer, Leonie Gilmour, and the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, who did not marry her; he was raised in Japan until thirteen and then sent alone to Indiana. He apprenticed briefly to Gutzon Borglum, who told him he would never be a sculptor, and then in Paris to Brancusi, whose stone-cutting discipline shaped everything after. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, he voluntarily entered the Poston internment camp in Arizona intending to improve conditions through design, was refused permission to leave for seven months, and came out disillusioned. The Graham collaborations from 1935 gave him a second career: sets that are sculptures the dancers move through rather than decor. He designed the Akari light sculptures from Gifu paper lanterns, the sunken garden at Chase Manhattan, the UNESCO garden in Paris, playgrounds that were mostly never built because New York parks officials refused them, and the Bill of Rights memorial that was rejected. His studio on Shikoku and his museum in Queens are both open. The Akari lamps are still made by the same Ozeki workshop in Gifu that produced the first ones in 1951. He designed the two bridges at the Hiroshima Peace Park, but the city rejected his design for the cenotaph itself because he was American. His garden for the Beinecke Library at Yale is made of three marble forms on a sunken white floor and is meant to be looked at rather than entered. The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, which he laid out himself in a former photoengraving plant, opened in 1985 and was the first museum in America founded by a living artist for his own work.

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