{"id":7596,"date":"2026-01-14T13:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T18:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=7596"},"modified":"2026-01-22T22:24:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T03:24:43","slug":"isamu-noguchi-landscapes-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2026\/01\/14\/isamu-noguchi-landscapes-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
\n<\/span><\/span>July 19, 2025\u2013October 13, 2025
\n<\/span>by Jessica Braum<\/span><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
\n

A quiet constellation titled Akari<\/em> Light Sculptures<\/em> (c. 1951\u201376), poetically luminous and palpably weightless, floats at the center of Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time<\/em> (July 19, 2025\u2013October 13, 2025), immediately capturing the viewer\u2019s gaze and establishing a sense of ephemerality that attunes visitors to Noguchi\u2019s enduring engagement with the concept of time (fig. 1). Located in the Michael Conforti Pavilion of the Clark Art Institute, a rectangular gallery space bounded by glass on three sides, the exhibition presents a non-chronological selection of the artist\u2019s works framed by Noguchi\u2019s \u201cfascination with time [and]…his broader search for belonging.\u201d1<\/sup>\u00a0By tracing flows of influence, material processes, and cultural intersections, the exhibition showcases Noguchi\u2019s formal innovation and emphasizes the ethical and imaginative possibilities of engaging with time and transnational cultural currents as forces that shape human experience and artistic expression. Addressing these themes together is an ambitious undertaking, one that exposes a tension between the exhibition\u2019s conceptual scope and its cohesive execution.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Figure 1. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). Akari Light Sculptures<\/em> (c. 1951\u201376). Paper, bamboo, metal. Dimensions variable. Photo provided by the author. \u00a9 2025 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.\u00a0<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Yet the dominant sensory appeal of the Akari<\/em> risks flattening the curatorial narrative, reducing Noguchi to a poetic modernist rather than an artist deeply engaged with questions of material, space, and time. Noguchi himself conceived of the Akari<\/em> not merely as decorative objects, but as extensions of his early experiments with self-illuminating sculpture\u2014a series of works linked by their internal light and by titles invoking the lunar.2<\/sup> This titular reference to the moon is instructive; Noguchi likened his memory of confinement in Poston, an internment camp in Arizona, where Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated during World War II, to \u201cthat of the moon, a moonscape of the mind\u2026 an illusion within the confines of a room or a box, where the imagination may roam to the further limits of possibilities, to the moon and beyond.\u201d3<\/sup>\u00a0The Akari<\/em> thus echo this interior landscape of imagined expansiveness. However, the curators\u2019 decision to foreground washi paper lanterns, objects traditionally associated with Japan, offers an entry point while also reinforcing a simplified narrative of cultural symbolism\u2014an emphasis that gestures toward the exhibition\u2019s investment in curatorial cohesion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moving outward from the Akari<\/em> at the center, the gallery\u2019s perimeter offers a more expansive view of Noguchi\u2019s engagement with time across media, scale, and collaborative practice. The selection of artworks reflects six decades of Noguchi\u2019s practice and situates him within the broader discourse of global modernism. The earliest work on view, Measured Time<\/em> (1932), a design for a commercial kitchen timer, is tightly framed within the exhibition\u2019s thematic parameters, leaving less room for a more nuanced understanding of the artist (fig. 2). The object offers a literal expression of the curatorial premise, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding sculptures, whose engagement with time is more abstract and complex. The didactic text\u2019s reference to Noguchi\u2019s \u201clifelong preoccupation with time\u201d sits uneasily with the object, underscoring the exhibition\u2019s occasional overreliance on thematic coherence.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Figure 2. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). Measured Time<\/em> (1932). Bakelite, glass, printed paper, enameled brass. Photo provided by the author. \u00a9 2025 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Nevertheless, subsequent works introduce a more layered account of Noguchi\u2019s engagement with time and his disregard for hierarchies between disciplines, as well as his dialogues with other interlocutors. For example, Spider Dress<\/em> and Serpent<\/em> for Martha Graham\u2019s Cave of the Heart<\/em> (1946) link Noguchi not only with Graham, one of his most important collaborators, but also with theater through his work on set and costume design. This multidisciplinary engagement was formative, offering him a conception of space as \u201can open volume within which the illusion of infinite space may be created.\u201d4<\/sup>\u00a0The work The Seed<\/em> (1946; fabricated c. 1979), a tripartite abstraction with a polished metallic finish, recalls the sculptural syntax of Constantin Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i, with whom Noguchi apprenticed as a stonecutter in Paris.<\/span><\/p>\n

A large-scale photograph of Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars<\/em> (1947) spans the gallery\u2019s innermost wall, depicting a sand model for an unrealized monumental sculpture composed of colossal earth mounds that together suggest the shape of a human face. Flanking this image in a striking reversal of scale, a selection of maquettes and plaster models invites viewers to imagine the ambition of Noguchi\u2019s public works and play equipment. Slide Mantra Maquette<\/em> (1985), a scale model for a ten-foot marble slide constructed for the 1986 Venice Biennale, exemplifies Noguchi\u2019s philosophy of \u201chumanizing space\u201d (fig. 3).5<\/sup>\u00a0Its spiral form unites ascent and descent\u2014progress and return\u2014embodying Noguchi\u2019s belief that the past is not simply gone but remains embedded within the motion of life and art.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 3. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), constructed with Giorgio Angeli. Slide Mantra Maquette<\/em> (1985). Carrara marble. 27.2 x 24.3 x 27.8 in. (69.2 x 61.6 x 70.5 cm). Photo provided by the author. \u00a9 2025 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Noguchi\u2019s broader practice resists linearity and embraces what he called a \u201cradiant\u201d sense of time, extending in all directions\u2014past, present, and future alike.6<\/sup> His reflections on \u201cthe quality of enduring\u201d and the necessity of imperfection point to an understanding of sculpture as a living process, inseparable from nature, memory, and human experience.7<\/sup>\u00a0Two of the most evocative pieces in the exhibition, This Earth, This Passage<\/em> (1962; cast 1963) and Age<\/em> (1981), may be read as unfolding meditations on duration, recurrence, and geological time. This Earth, This Passage<\/em>, displayed directly on the floor, materializes Noguchi\u2019s exploration of time by recording his circular steps in wet clay, later cast in bronze (fig. 4). The resulting form captures cyclical motion, the imprint of walking as both process and residue, suggesting the overlap of past and present, history and imagined futures. Age<\/em>, a basalt sculpture, stands close to the gallery\u2019s entrance, its surface bearing an expansive language of carved marks intertwined with traces of natural processes (fig. 5). Noguchi deliberately left portions of the stone\u2019s ochre surface untouched, preserving the natural crust formed by slow oxidation, a record of the material\u2019s own transformation. The variety and rhythm of carved marks are, at times, painterly: some recall drops of ink dispersing in swirls and loops of water, while others reveal the stone\u2019s resistance to Noguchi\u2019s tools, recalling a lesson he learned as Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i\u2019s stonecutter, that \u201cthe large saws\u2026must not be forced but gently cut of their own weight. The wide blade of the axe leaves its mark, and that is how it should be left\u2014the direct contact of man and matter.\u201d8<\/sup> Together, these works visualize sculpture as an interaction between artist and matter, positioning time and change as both human-directed processes and geological forces.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Figure 4. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). This Earth, This Passage <\/em>(1962 [cast 1963]). Bronze. 4.6 x 44.3 x 41 in. (11.7 x 112.4 x 104.1 cm). Photo provided by the author. \u00a9 2025 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 5. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988).\u00a0Age<\/em> (detail) (1981). Basalt. 78.4 x 25.5 x 21.3 in. (199.1 x 62.2 x 54 cm). Granite base: 15.7 x 18 x 18 in. (40 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm). Photo provided by the author. \u00a9 2025 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The exhibition\u2019s ambition to address time, belonging, interdisciplinarity, and cross-cultural experience reveals a productive yet unresolved tension between conceptual breadth and spatial limitation. Some of the larger works, including Time Thinking<\/em> and Spin-off #2 from Sunken Garden, Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza<\/em>, are positioned in a tight linear sequence along the gallery\u2019s windowed left wall, where the narrow proportions of the space dampen their spatial vitality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Curated by Matthew Kirsch and Kate Wiener, Landscapes of Time<\/em> succeeds in conveying Noguchi\u2019s sensitivity to material and his commitment to working across disciplines, yet his more speculative and cross-cultural investigations remain only partially realized. Noguchi\u2019s own reflections on belonging\u2014rooted in a bicultural life between Japan and the United States, as well as in a peripatetic, world-spanning practice\u2014underscore the multiplicities that shape his practice. His sculptures inhabit the interstice between permanence and transience, matter and imagination, suggesting that belonging itself may reside within this movement, a continual becoming that, like his imagined moonscape, transforms constraint into boundless possibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

A final, unexpected impression arises from the viewer\u2019s engagement with the gallery\u2019s atmosphere. Because the exhibition text was distributed as a pamphlet rather than mounted on the walls, visitors frequently read aloud to one another, generating a low hum of voices throughout the space. Fragments of biography and interpretation, floating alongside the works, lent an auditory dimension to Noguchi\u2019s search for meaning across time, place, and material, quietly echoing the luminous Akari<\/em> at the exhibition\u2019s center.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The artworks and reproductions thereof are expressly excluded from any open-access or open license grant of rights. All rights are expressly reserved by ARS on behalf of the Artist, Estate or Foundation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Jessica Braum<\/strong> (she\/her) is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Temple University. Her dissertation examines Kim Lim\u2019s print and sculptural practice through transnational feminist frameworks, reassessing postwar British and Southeast Asian art histories. Engaging feminist theories and multidisciplinary methods, she studies artists working across geographic and cultural contexts. Her writing has appeared in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas<\/em>, ASAP\/Journal<\/em>, and Passage<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

1. Clark Art Institute and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time <\/em>(Clark Art Institute, 2025), 1.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Naguchi\u2019s self-illuminating sculptures include Lunar Infant<\/em> (1944), Lunar Landscape<\/em>, and Red Lunar Fist<\/em> (1944).<\/span><\/p>\n

3. Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor\u2019s World <\/em>(Thames & Hudson, 1968), 45.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. Clark Art Institute and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time<\/em>, 3-4.<\/span><\/p>\n

5. \u201cIsamu Noguchi: The Sculpture of Spaces.\u201d 1995. Films On Demand<\/em>. Films Media Group. Accessed October 22, 2025, https:\/\/fod.infobase.com\/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=103640&xtid=32843.<\/span><\/p>\n

6. Isamu Noguchi, \u201cThe Road I Have Walked,\u201d in The Inamori Foundation: Kyoto Prizes & Inamori Grants<\/em>, (Inamori Foundation, 1990), 125.<\/span><\/p>\n

7. Noguchi, \u201cThe Road I have Walked,\u201d 123.<\/span><\/p>\n

8. Benjamin Forgey, “Isamu Noguchi’s Elegant World of Space and Function,” Smithsonian<\/em> 9 (April 1978): 49, https:\/\/archive.noguchi.org\/Detail\/bibliography\/1592.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA July 19, 2025\u2013October 13, 2025 by Jessica Braum A quiet constellation titled Akari Light Sculptures (c. 1951\u201376), poetically luminous and palpably weightless, floats at the center of Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time (July 19, 2025\u2013October 13, 2025), immediately capturing the viewer\u2019s gaze and establishing a sense of ephemerality that attunes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25734,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7596"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7742,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7596\/revisions\/7742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}