We visited an exhibition of the sculpture of Isamu Noguchi at the Japanese-American Museum.

These sculptures really spoke to me. Many of them dealt with the concepts of “space” and “container”. “Container” is something wired deep into our evolutionary minds. Thinking about containers is fun, and helps us understand the mind with which we go about everyday life. Noguchi’s sculptures help us think about containers, such as his simple brown container with holes poked into it and funny legs.

Noguchi was a “haafu”, who mainly worked in NY (where his atelier has been turned into a museum that I’d love to visit). In addition to sculptures, he designed public spaces, lamps, and stage sets. There’s a bit of a personal connection here: he was born in Los Angeles, and spent a year in Kita-Kamakura; he was also exhibited early in his career at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art.

For more information on Noguchi, I recommend visiting the Noguchi page on artsy.net, which provides visitors with Noguchi’s bio, over 70 of his works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date Noguchi exhibition listings.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2004 at 23:55 and is filed under history and culture, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.