Against Time
The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation
The Noguchi Museum celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2025, with an exhibition Against Time (curated by Matthew Kirsch) showcasing iconic and key works of Isamu Noguchi from the Museum’s original second floor installation. These will return to those galleries for the first time since 2009.
Kirsch is the Noguchi Museum Curator and Director of Research and has brought these important Noguchi works back on the museum floor for guests to revisit and rediscover the vast expression of Noguchi’s mind and heart.
The exhibition Against Time takes its foundations from 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 for both display and wall labels. It is a distillation of various phases of the museum from 1985–88, adapted and reimagined according to archival photographs documenting how Noguchi assiduously arranged and rearranged his works in different constellations in the first years of the Museum.
The key works on show present Noguchi’s experimentation with mediums and various materials such as stone, iron and brass, painting and public projects over the course of six decades. He had many personal breakthroughs during this time, and the works on display present those significant breakthroughs.
With more than 60 works on display, visitors can see firsthand important examples of Noguchi’s first forays into abstraction with brass and wood sculptures. Three portrait busts are also on display, which Noguchi made in the 1930s after a short stint as an assistant in Constantin Brancusi’s studio in Paris, influenced to explore the medium.
Rarely exhibited as a group, Against Time presents an authentic view on Noguchi’s vision and scope of work, both through Noguchi’s eyes and curator Kirsch, to rediscover the pivotal ideas of the immutable artist once again.
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
and Garden Museum
9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City, New York 11106
On View August 28, 2024 – January 11, 2026
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Images: Kevin Noble. ©INFGM : ARS – Noguchi Foundation©