About the Exhibition

Isamu Noguchi, Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars, 1947, photomural: unrealized model in sand. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 01646, © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society. Photo: Soichi Sunami

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. –Isamu Noguchi

Japanese‐American artist Isamu Noguchi made these provocative remarks on the nature of time during a 1972 interview in his studio in Long Island City, New York. This was not the first time Noguchi had reflected on this subject, and it would not be the last. Time is a thematic undercurrent seen throughout his 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 US 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.

This exhibition 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. Across these varied works, we 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 us 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.

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.