By Liz Goff

Not everyone can be as big as life. Some people’s talent and drive qualify them for merely a building. Isamu Noguchi, one of the world’s greatest and best-known sculptors and interior designers, is one such person.

The Noguchi Museum, located in the heart of Long Island City, reopened its doors to the public in June, following a $13.5-million renovation project that took just over two years to complete.

The Noguchi Museum graced LIC since 1985.

Thanks to improvements made during the renovation, the museum is now fully accessible to people with disabilities. It can also remain open year-round, even in winter. New space has been created to house a permanent collection at the museum, along with space for public outreach programs to enhance and expand services to students, teachers and groups with special needs, according to Noguchi director Jenny Dixon.

The museum’s current exhibition, titled “Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design,” offers an inside look on its founder’s extraordinary career. It contains more than 100 of the sculptor’s pieces. The exhibit was designed by the internationally renowned theater director Robert Wilson.

“Noguchi and Graham: Selected Works for Dance” will open in December, offering a retrospective of Noguchi’s collaborations with choreographer Martha Graham. The exhibit will be presented by Noguchi’s former partner, Bonnie Rychlak, museum curator. The exhibit will be the first to occupy space created through renovation, Dixon said.
Isamu Noguchi designed and created the museum in a former industrial building that he converted “to display examples” of his life’s work, he said. He also quipped that he put his studio and museum in Long Island City to have easy access to large pieces of stone. A master of public space, Noguchi proposed several radical ideas to the City Parks Foundation throughout the 1930s. Opened in 1985 with outstanding outdoor water sculptures as part of its first exhibits, the museum was hailed as a frontrunner for cultural institutions in Long Island City. The area now houses the P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Museum of African Art and the Fisher Landau Center for Art, to name a few.

The sculptor worked in the space until his death in 1988, bringing in materials from all over Queens, New York City and the world to create his abstract expressionist works.
Noguchi’s original design included an open-air sculpture garden housed in a 10-gallery museum. A walk through Noguchi’s “gardens” offers patrons a peaceful, reflective introspective into Noguchi’s works.

Noguchi’s sculptures are on display in one of the museum’s galleries.

The covered sculpture garden frames the museum entrance and leads to galleries that will now house the sculptor’s permanent collection of works.
A second-floor gallery will offer temporary exhibitions relating to Noguchi’s work, on view during fall, winter and spring. A “summer reflection” will be on display for two months each year, offering a selection of works from the Noguchi’s collection, including dance sets, interior design projects, sculptures and his astonishing collection of Akari light sculptures.

The museum will also house Noguchi’s complete archives, available to educators and patrons of the sculptor’s talents, according to Dixon.


To make it easier for visitors to the city to come to the museum, the Noguchi Museum is planning to initiate a weekend shuttle bus service between the museum and Manhattan beginning Oct. 2. Buses will take a 30-minute trip five times from Manhattan to LIC and seven times back to give the revelers enough time to explore the museum and the adjacent neighborhoods. The first bus will be leaving Manhattan at 11:30 a.m., and the last bus from Queens will be leaving at 6 p.m.

The trip is not free--a round-trip fare is $10. Considering that the similar trip would cost over $40 using a cab, the shuttle bus service represents a viable and affordable alternative.