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CLARK ART INSTITUTE PRESENTS EXHIBITION ON THE WORK OF ISAMU NOGUCHI
Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time opens July 19, 2025
Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute presents a survey of the acclaimed Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988). Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time surveys Noguchi’s perennial engagements with the concept of time, from his early design for a commercial kitchen timer to his late carvings of millennia-old stone. The exhibition is on view July 19 through October 13, 2025 in the Clark Center’s Michael Conforti Pavilion.
The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Long Island City, New York. The Noguchi Museum’s Curator and Director of Research Matthew Kirsch and Curator Kate Wiener curated the exhibition and conceptualized the presentation at the Clark in partnership with Esther Bell, the Institute’s Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator.
“The elegance and simplicity of Noguchi’s sculptures belie the deep complexity and power of his vision,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “In this exhibition, the artist’s meditations on both the fleeting and enduring nature of time provide a unique lens through which to appreciate these remarkable objects. The opportunity to present Noguchi’s works in juxtaposition with Tadao Ando’s architecture is particularly appealing as it seems to create a dynamic dialogue between the sculptures and the space.”
The exhibition features thirty-seven objects representing a wide array of Noguchi’s sculptures in a variety of materials, all united through the concept of time’s passage.
“Isamu Noguchi once compared the trajectory of his career to a circle or spiral, acknowledging that despite a common perception that artists must progress linearly, he often returned newly inspired to certain favored materials and areas of interests. This small survey charts how Noguchi subtly used materials old and new, inspirations from the past and, occasionally, visions of the future to engage with a favorite subject: time,” said Matthew Kirsch, curator and director of research at The Noguchi Museum.
Kate Wiener, curator at The Noguchi Museum, noted that, “As an alumna of the Williams College Graduate Program it is a special honor to return to The Clark to present this exhibition of Isamu Noguchi’s work. I hope that through this non-chronological survey, visitors will come to appreciate Noguchi’s extraordinary ability to reach beyond the strictures of time and model new relationships to the ephemeral and the eternal.”
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
“You know, one shifts—I do—backwards and forwards. Sometimes I think I’m part of this world of today. Sometimes I feel that maybe I belong in history or in prehistory, or that there’s no such thing as time. . . . If you [can] escape from that time constraint, then the whole world . . . is someplace where you belong.”[1]
Noguchi made these provocative remarks on the nature of time during a filmed interview in 1972 in New York City. This was not the first time the artist had reflected on this subject, and it would not be the last. Time is a thematic undercurrent seen throughout Noguchi’s practice, uniting work that spanned a range of materials and disciplines—from his steel and stone sculptures to his designs for playgrounds, furniture, and dance sets.
Noguchi’s fascination with time was bound up with his broader search for belonging. As an artist of mixed heritage, Noguchi felt pulled between the cultures of the United States and Japan and often described himself as “belonging everywhere and nowhere.” The artist channeled these feelings into work that transcended social, artistic, and temporal boundaries. In his attempts to escape such constraints, Noguchi forged a hybrid practice through which he could more freely exist, explore, and belong.
Across his varied works, visitors can find the artist engaging with time on many levels—human, geological, and cosmic—and in varied forms: as a physical force that erodes material, as the fabric of tradition and history, and as a limitation to be challenged. Viewed as a whole, these works invite visitors to join Noguchi in his timeless search for belonging and to find new meaning in the blurred spaces that exist between the past, present, and future. The exhibition features six key sections highlighting various aspects of Noguchi’s work:
CYCLICAL TIME
Noguchi’s lifelong preoccupation with time began with his streamlined design for the casing of a commercial kitchen timer in 1932. Over the next several decades, his engagements with time would grow more abstract. In his mid-career work This Earth, This Passage (1962), Noguchi explored the passage of time by walking in a ring of clay with bare feet and then casting the resulting form in bronze. The artist’s journey is fixed in his trail of footprints yet seems to unfold endlessly in an unbroken loop. In his later basalt works like Age (1981) and Time Thinking (1968), Noguchi found another means of giving material form to time’s passage. He delighted in using the most modern of tools on the oldest of materials, engaging in what he called a “meeting from opposite ends of time.” Wishing to maintain the evidence of stone’s own evolution over time, Noguchi left visible portions of the basalt’s ochre-colored skin, a crust that forms as its iron contents slowly oxidize. These works meditate on the cycles of change—both human-directed and geological.
COLLABORATION WITH MARTHA GRAHAM
Groundbreaking choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991) was one of Noguchi’s most important artistic collaborators. Noguchi was frequently commissioned to create sculptural set designs for her dance performances, many of which were modern reinterpretations of Greek myths. For Graham’s performance Cave of the Heart, a reimagining of the betrayal of Medea and her violent revenge, Noguchi designed a transfixing Serpent (1946) platform and Spider Dress (1946) worn by Medea. With each performance, these mythic fragments are inhabited and invested with new life, and the line between past and present is captivatingly blurred.
NOGUCHI’S MATERIALS
Noguchi’s sculptures frequently explore the life cycles of natural and industrial materials. In the early 1960s, he used basalt boulders, carved by the rushing currents of Japan’s Uji River over centuries as seen in Spin-off #2 from Sunken Garden, Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (1961–64). The artist’s presentation of the boulder in its raw, unaltered state highlights the passage of time and reframes the river’s erosive power as a creative act. Later, in works like Magritte’s Stone (1982–83), Noguchi sought to reveal how an industrially processed material such as steel can also change over time, possessing “its own secret nature—its own entropy, [and] its own cycle of birth and dissolution.” As evidenced by the two editions of this work presented in this exhibition—one fabricated in the 1980s and darkened with age, and the other posthumously fabricated in 2023, luminous and shiny—galvanized steel develops an increasingly discernible patina over time, much like an aging boulder. Noguchi delighted in this “new nature,” reminding us that nothing escapes time’s persistent stream.
STONE AGE AND SPACE AGE
In the 1960s and ’70s, when space travel came to represent the pinnacle of modern human technological achievement, Noguchi was thinking as much about the past as he was about the future. He once remarked, “I like to think, when you get to the furthest point of technology, when you get to outer space, what do you find to bring back? Rocks!” In his granite works, Noguchi drew connections between the Stone Age and the Space Age. While his Re-Entry Cone (1970) alludes to a module of a spacecraft that returns to earth following spaceflight, his incised Lunar Table (1961–65) resembles a cross-section of the moon’s surface, undulating in a way that suggests the artist may have had Albert Einstein’s theories of curved space-time in mind. Noguchi’s enigmatic black basalt work titled Origin (1968) prompts reflection on the concept of birth or invention across the vastly different timescales of human and cosmic life.
WORLD WAR II AND THE ATOMIC AGE
Noguchi was deeply affected by the events of World War II, a sentiment amplified by his own complex background as the son of a Japanese father and an American mother. In response to the death and destruction of this period, the artist began a series of works that reckon with how humans remember the past and memorialize loss. These include his ultimately unrealized proposals for the devastated city of Hiroshima: Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950), a seventy-foot fragmented structure with dangling bells sourced from around the world, and Memorial to the Dead, Hiroshima (1953), a cenotaph and underground crypt honoring those killed by the atomic bombs. The latter sculpture, as well as a series of slab ceramic works made around the same time, purposefully allude to haniwa, ancient Japanese burial sculptures that had long interested Noguchi, and which he found solace in remaking in the postwar present.
In the postwar years, while reckoning with the existential threat of atomic warfare, Noguchi produced a series of works in which interlocking fragments are held tenuously together by gravity alone. While Remembrance (Mortality) (1944) palpably expresses the fragility of human existence, The Seed (1946) extends hope that new life might spring from the shards of the past. He originally constructed The Seed using thin sheets of marble, but later reproduced it in highly polished aluminum, recasting it with a gleaming modernity. In later years, he continued to create carefully composed yet fragmented sculptures like Mortality (1959), describing the hanging components of these sculptures as “arrested pendulums” giving form to his “preoccupation with time (and resonance).”
AKARI
Noguchi believed in a model of progress wherein one moves towards the future by looking to the past. In 1951, he began producing light sculptures based on traditional handmade Japanese paper lanterns, regarding his new creations as “a true development of an old tradition.” He called them Akari, a Japanese word meaning “light,” suggesting both illumination and weightlessness. Adding electrical bulbs and experimenting widely with the shape of his Akari, Noguchi reimagined the paper lantern as an art form with profound relevance, use, and beauty in the modern age. As much as Akari are meant to express a sense of legacy and tradition, he also appreciated their transitory character. He explained, “The quality is poetic, ephemeral, and tentative. Looking more fragile than they are Akari seem to float, casting their light as in passing. They do not encumber our space as mass or as a possession; if they hardly exist in use, when not in use they fold away in an envelope. They perch light as a feather, some pinned to the wall, others clipped to a cord, and all may be moved with the thought.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most significant sculptors. His practice was defined by his tireless exploration of material, a commitment to interdisciplinarity, and a belief in sculpture as a vehicle for social change. Noguchi was born in Los Angeles to a white American mother and a Japanese father, and spent his childhood in both the United States and Japan. He later established studios in both countries. In 1985, Noguchi opened the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, now known as The Noguchi Museum, in a building adjacent to his studio in Long Island City, New York. Noguchi conceived of the museum as a repository of his work and record of his thinking, but also as a living resource: a shared space for visitors to come together, reflect, and learn. His studio in Mure, Japan became The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum Japan in 1999.
Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time is co-organized by the Clark Art Institute and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and curated by the Museum's Curator and Director of Research Matthew Kirsch and Curator Kate Wiener.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Cynthia and Ron Beck.
RELATED EVENTS
NOGUCHI ART-MAKING: LIGHT SCULPTURES
Thursdays: July 24 & 31 and August 7, 14, 21 & 28, 1–4 pm
Fernández Terrace
Artist Isamu Noguchi used creative combinations of materials to make sculptures that were beautiful and functional, and now you can, too. Check out the exhibition Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time, and get inspired by Noguchi’s floating lanterns, mini models, and sculptures of stone and steel. Drop in anytime between 1–4 pm to make your own light sculpture. Mix and match materials such as wire, reed, and rock to create a sculpture that can hold a little light. Bring home your “landscape of time” and see how your sculpture changes in different lighting.
Free. Rain cancels this event.
Family programs are generously supported by Allen & Company.
Fridays: July 25 and August 1, 8, 15, 22 & 29, 1 pm
Meet in the Museum Pavilion
What makes a sculpture a sculpture? A Clark educator leads an interactive discussion exploring this question. Examine the work of sculptor Isamu Noguchi in dialogue with more traditional sculpture from the Clark’s permanent collection.
Free with gallery admission. Capacity is limited. Pick up a ticket at the Clark Center admissions desk, available on a first-come, first-served basis.
OPENING LECTURE: ISAMU NOGUCHI—LANDSCAPES OF TIME
August 9, 11 am
Manton Research Center auditorium
The Isamu Noguchi Museum Foundation and Garden Museum’s Matthew Kirsch, curator and director of research, and Kate Wiener, curator, introduce Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time. Kirsch and Wiener provide insight into how Noguchi’s non-linear approach shaped his work, from ancient influences to futuristic visions, offering a deeper understanding of his search for belonging beyond temporal constraints.
Free. For accessibility questions, call 413 458 0524.
Public Programs
A full slate of public programs is planned throughout the run of the exhibition; details are available at clarkart.edu/events.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of some 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday, from September through June, and daily in July and August. Admission is free January through March and is $20 from April through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and the EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
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