A Break From The Grind
Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum
By Josh Parish
Getting Started
The wide-open spaces and natural lighting make a peaceful viewing environment for Noguchi’s stone and marble sculptures. |
Isamu Noguchi, the great Japanese-American sculptor and interior designer, once kept his studio right across the street from this Long Island City museum. The grounds on which the space now stands were used as storage for Noguchi’s robust works (most are carved from giant slabs of stone or marble), and was purchased by Noguchi himself in the 1970s.
Opened in 1985, and first featuring mainly outdoor water sculptures, the museum was hailed as a new model for cultural institutions in LIC. Noguchi, whose father was a Japanese poet and mother a Brooklynite, designed and created the place specifically to show his work. He used it until his death in 1988.
Originally open by appointment only (part of Noguchi’s plan to cultivate a contemplative environment for viewing his works), the museum is now open five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday.
When you enter the front foyer, you’ll pay a modest $5 for general admission, $2.50 for senior citizens and students with a valid ID.
A unique twist to the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum: not a single piece inside the indoor/outdoor complex bears a title plaque. Instead, information on each sculpture is printed on laminated cards available in each room, which visitors can carry around as they tour. That means you can wander from room to room—and garden to garden—in a kind of dazed, aesthetic wilderness, free from any ideas about the art other than your own.
Digging In
When it opened in 1985, the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum signaled a new beginning for the arts in Long Island City. |
If you’re the kind who likes a little background, pick up some museum literature before you step into the entry pavilion. Few of the pieces inside are roped off, either, which puts visitor and sculpture in cozy proximity. Here’s what the museum’s official brochure says about the barrier-free environment:
“It makes for an intimate experience with the work but also regrettably suggests that one may have a tactile engagement with the work. This is not the case.”
In other words, don’t touch anything.
You’ll want to, of course; the textures of Noguchi’s stones beg for a feel, especially the rough-hewn pieces in the first room. The museum is divided into separate galleries, called “Areas” on museum maps. The open-air entry pavilion, Area 1, houses some of Noguchi’s most formidable pieces—great chunks of basalt and granite, cut, chiseled and sanded with utmost discrimination.
Since there are no velvet ropes or steel chains, it’s easy to overlook a few gems throughout the museum. (Or to mistake some pieces of art for things other than, you know, pieces of art.) Take time to notice smaller bits like “Spin-off #3 from The Chase Manhattan Plaza,” a naturally formed piece of granite from the Uji River sitting quietly at the trunk of the tall tree in Area 1.
Remember this is a garden museum. A master of public space, Noguchi proposed several radical ideas to the City Parks Foundation in his youth; later in life, he also designed and saw to completion monumental urban projects like the Civic Center Plaza in Detroit and the Play Scapes in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, a kids’ utopia that’s half-playground, half-urban sculpture.
You’ll see Noguchi’s knack for placement inside Area 2, the only exclusively outdoor gallery. The trickling sculpture fountains and sunlit blocks of stone aren’t the only art around; those manicured shrubs and purposefully laid-out stones along the pathway are part of the exhibit, too. Even the table in front of the garden benches is a Noguchi work.
“The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement,” Noguchi said of landscaping. “Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature. But I am also a sculptor of the West. I place my mark and do not hide.”
Finishing Up
All other Areas are inside the main building of the museum. To get an idea how Noguchi’s interior designs differ from his outdoor ones, walk through the museum’s shop just inside the entranceway—it’s full of furniture designed by the sculptor.
Another tucked-away treasure is Area 5. It shows a short film on the life and work of Noguchi that includes interviews with the man himself and images of him constructing the urban projects in Detroit and Atlanta.
Area 6 houses a single sculpture. “Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima” is a steel and wood piece begun by Noguchi shortly after the atomic bomb ended World War II for both his homelands—one the conqueror, one the conquered. It took him another 30 years to complete the sculpture.
Throughout the rest of the museum, more refined works than the ones in the entry pavilion are the standard; great polished rings of marble, smaller ornamental sculptures and interior pieces like chests of drawers take up the space.
Be sure to catch the architectural models for Noguchi’s unrealized urban projects in Area 11. They’ll leave you with a sense of awe at Noguchi’s proposed scale—and one hell of a desire to have stood before one completed.
The Isamu Noguchi
Garden Museum
32-37 Vernon Blvd.
(entrance at 9-01 33rd Rd), Long Island City (646) 486-7050
www.noguchi.org
10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat.-Sun. Closed Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. $5 adults, $2.50 seniors and students with ID, kids 12 and under free.
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