Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation

Coinciding with The Noguchi Museum’s 40th anniversary in 2025, works from the Museum’s original second floor installation will return to those galleries for the first time since 2009. Against Time is curated by Matthew Kirsch, Noguchi Museum Curator and Director of Research. Against Time uses as its basis the catalogue The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), written by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) as a guide to works in the Museum in place of traditional wall labels, which was in turn used to define the Museum’s permanent collection after his death in December 1988. This original installation consisted of sculptures that had accumulated before and after Noguchi’s move to his 10th Street studio in Long Island City in 1961. Noguchi considered a number of these to be personal breakthroughs, works that represented significant turns and returns within his cyclical practice over the course of six decades. Against Time could never replicate Noguchi’s exact vision for these galleries, as they have since been repartitioned after renovations in the early 2000s. Rather, this installation is a distillation of various phases from 1985–88, adapted and reimagined according to archival photographs documenting how Noguchi assiduously arranged and rearranged his works in different constellations in the first years of the Museum.