EXHIBITION TALK Isamu Noguchi: Sculpture and the Elusive Sense of Belonging

As a sculptor, the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) dedicated much of his long career to the art of manipulating solids and voids to create aesthetic experience, a practice frequently driven by the desire to carve a more satisfying niche of imagined belonging for himself and/or others.  Perhaps the elusiveness of such a quest fueled the remarkable range and diversity of the stylistic, technical, material, and cultural resources Noguchi brought to his sculptural mission. 

Bert Winther-Tamaki, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Califonia at Irvine and co-author of the exhibition catalogue accompanying Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, will explore the specific sculptural initiatives at various points along Noguchi’s career — such as his portrait busts of New Yorkers in the 1920s, Japanese clay work in the 1950s, design of plazas for postwar American cities and the rock abstractions of his late years – and look at them as a laboratory for mediating personal and cultural affiliations that were alternatively inspired and inhibited by social and ideological forces such as modernism, nationalism, exoticism and universalism.
 
Tickets: $10; Japan Society and The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum members and seniors; students $5.