Noguchi part 1

• Marie: What’s our next unit?
• Kozak: Noguchi!!!!
• Marie: Isn’t he next to Costco?
• Kozak: YES! Yes he is.
• Marie: I FOUND IT !
Field Trip on
Wednesday
May 4th
2:30pm

Qualities of great sculptures
• Myar: It’s gotta mean something memorable….something taught over and
over again in history. (The “Canon” of history)
• Kevin: Gotta have details, and not so obvious…like a hidden meaning or
secret (clandestine ideas)
• Ny: Revolutionary for a certain time period….recognized by other artists as
“great”
– Jojo: great sculptors choose materials wisely to relate to the viewer.
– MicheLLe: if it’s huge or small, it catches your eye.
– Ruhith: “If it’s bigger it’s better.” (like the Lincoln Memorial)
• Kinny: It’s gotta have a PRESENCE….like Ke$ha at a party.
• Ny: Sculptures don’t have to be MASSIVE…but if they’re controversial they’ll
get plenty of attention.
• Brian: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder only YOU can determine whether
it’s great or not.
– Personal connection: It’s gotta be relatable.
– Jean: Knowledge or history of the thing helps you appreciate it.
– Ruhith: Significant to present day problems or ideas.
– BRIAN: We assume that the sculptor put time and care into making the thing.

Qualities of great sculptures
• Raph: Great detail (faces, bodies, or whatever the image is.
• Ayy: The sculpture has a SUBJECT (what if it’s abstract? How do we define
the subject?)
– Tina: The title and/or description helps explain the subject of the sculpture, like
in allegorical
– Raph: the viewer may see the sculpture from different perspectives….
– Vicky PT: The viewer’s feelings at the time of viewing can determine what we
think the subject is.
• Alannis: The artist may want a diverse amount of opinions. This may be
the BEST form of art. Because the work is now MORE than just one thing.
– Ayy: this is the case with a lot of pieces of art. It’s not unique
• Arvin: It’s gotta be very detailed and have a relatable message that I can
connect to.
• Amina: Arvin said it all. It’s gotta connect to me.
• Guzzy: Even if you think it’s ugly, you can still connect with it. It could be
tragic, sad, etc. The fact that it’s evoking an emotional (even critical)
response you ARE connecting with it. It’s giving you the FEELS.

• the noguchi museum opened in 1985
• 24,000 square feet of gallery space,
two floors
• first floor: permanent exhibits
– outdoor sculpture garden
– café, museum shop
• second floor: temporary exhibits
• basement: education
about the museum

“The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum is devoted to the
preservation, documentation, presentation, and interpretation of the work of
Isamu Noguchi.”

Noguchi’s work fits into a very particular time period of Art History. His
work is evidence of a true transition in aesthetic appreciation from object-
based to experience-based.

Isamu Noguchi (1904–
1988) was one of the
twentieth century’s most
important and critically
acclaimed sculptors.
Through a lifetime of
artistic experimentation,
he created sculptures,
gardens, furniture and
lighting designs, ceramics,
architecture, and set
designs. His work, at once
subtle and bold,
traditional and modern,
set a new standard for the
reintegration of the arts.

What does it mean to be two things at
the same time?
• Ruhith: Things that have two functions, or something that has two
meanings at the same time.
– Example? Physical things like Phones!
• Tots: Artist who uses bees BEADS as a form of currency.
• Brian: Multiple Personality Disorder
• Gissell: someone from two cultures…being two things at once, (multi-
racial, Multi-national, cultural, ethnic)
– jojo: If you’re raised by someone from a different country you may be
“different” from others.
– Rasha: This is great, because you can have a culture you practice at home, but
this may be difficult to fit into certain categories.
– Tots: OTHERS may try to fit you into other categories that you don’t really
want to be put in.
• Kenny: Physically in one place but mentally somewhere else.
• Ny: It’s more efficient to be able to do two things as the same time.
• Jean: THOSE TWO THINGS HAVE TO WORK TOGETHER….If they’re a part of
you they need to co-exist.

What does it mean to be two things at
the same time?
• Ray: Multitasking….to be able to do two things at the
same time.
• Arvin: Multiple Personality Disorder?
• Amina: Occupations…you can be a daughter and
student, a mother and a doctor, etc.
• Jakara: Ambidextrous
• Guzzy: To have several layers to oneself.
• Tina: “Masquerade masquerade, paper faces on
parade” Shakespeare quote? People adapt to changes
in environment.
• Asian-American
• Citizens of Earth….I can be a HUMAN and a GIRL.

Moerenuma Park, Sapporo Japan
On what used to be a garbage disposal site, construction of
Moerenuma Park began in 1982, and the park had its grand opening
in 2005. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi created the basic design based on
the concept of “the whole being a single sculpture.” The fountain and
hills form many geometric shapes in the expansive grounds, facilities
for play equipment and so forth are arranged in an orderly manner,
and the landscape can be enjoyed as a fusion of nature and art.

“Tetra Mound” @Moerenuma Park

“Music Shell” @Moerenuma Park

• Myar: There’s art IN nature…nature is
IN art….they’re one in the same!
• Ruhith: Noguchi is using the
environment as a part of his work. It
feels peaceful.
• Tots: When someone hears of art they
think it has to be out of the norm….
• Jean: This is kinda like TWO THINGS
at once…
• Kenny: He’s using Nature as a CANVAS
for his art…molding it to what he
wants.
• Gissell: There’s great contrast
between the city and nature…it take
you out of the place you think you’re
in.
• Ny: Maybe he wanted people to know
these hidden mysteries in nature! A
sense of discovery.

• JEAN: It’s like a SPA…calming…
• Jojo: He’s using all the aspects of the
room. Beams on the ceiling, the objects
propping up the artwork.
• Gissell: IT reminds me of HOME. Like a
living room, a basement..a bedroom.
• Kenny: There’s serenity, and quietness!
• Taeron: HUGE difference from the
nature intertwining with the art….it’s
like a very modern museum.
• Joie: NAH TAERON: it doesn’t look
like a normal museum, it’s a single
artist and how it’s set up is different.
• Brian: it looks EXOTIC…out of the
ordinary, not easily found.

Isamu in Onorio Ruotolo’s art class
Born in Los Angeles, California, to an American mother
and a Japanese father, Noguchi lived in Japan until the
age of 13, when he moved to Indiana. While studying pre-
medicine at Columbia University, he took evening
sculpture classes on New York’s Lower East Side,
mentoring with the sculptor Onorio Ruotolo. He soon left
the University to become an academic sculptor.

Noguchi, an internationalist,
traveled extensively throughout
his life. (In his later years he
maintained studios both in
Japan and New York.) He
discovered the impact of large-
scale public works in Mexico,
earthy ceramics and tranquil
gardens in Japan, subtle ink-
brush techniques in China, and
the purity of marble in Italy. He
incorporated all of these
impressions into his work, which
utilized a wide range of
materials, including stainless
steel, marble, cast iron, balsa
wood, bronze, sheet aluminum,
basalt, granite, and water.

Constantin Brâncuși,
Portrait of Mademoiselle
Pogany [1], 1912, White
marble; limestone block,
Philadelphia Museum of
Art,
In 1926, Noguchi saw an
exhibition in New York of the
work of Constantin Brancusi
that profoundly changed his
artistic direction. With a John
Simon Guggenheim Fellowship,
Noguchi went to Paris, and
from 1927 to 1929 worked in
Brancusi’s studio. Inspired by
the older artist’s reductive
forms, Noguchi turned to
modernism and a kind of
abstraction, infusing his highly
finished pieces with a lyrical
and emotional expressiveness,
and with an aura of mystery.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
and the backlash against Japanese-
Americans in the United States had
a dramatic personal effect on
Noguchi, motivating him to become
a political activist. In 1942, Noguchi
became interested in raising
awareness of the patriotism of
Japanese-Americans, specifically the
Nisei (二世?, "second generation"),
which is a Japanese-language term
used in countries in North America
and South America to specify the
children born in the new country to
Japanese-born immigrants (who are
called Issei).

What would
YOU do?
At this time, Noguchi was working out of
studio at 33 MacDougal Alley, in
Greenwich Village, having spent much of
the 1930s based in New York City.
This moment forced Noguchi, who had
travelled internationally quite a bit at
this point (in Asia, Mexico, and Europe),
to take stock of his identity and
convictions.
While visiting friends in California, he
joined forces with Larry Tajiri, a
newspaper editor, and formed an
antifascist group, the Nisei Writers and
Artists Mobilization for Democracy.
Noguchi and Tajiri produced a manifesto
and attracted a set of West Coast
writers, including Eddie Shimano and
Kazu Ikeda.
He also asked to be placed in an
internment camp in Arizona, where he
lived for seven months.

Ben Sakoguchi’s Postcards from Camp
1999-2001, 80 paintings, acrylic on canvas, 11 inches x 16 inches

Noguchi arrived at Poston in mid-1942, with all
sorts of beautiful plans for parks and
agricultural cooperatives, prepared to make a
life in the community. Alas, it was not to be.
Noguchi soon found that he could not work
effectively in the heat and primitive conditions
at Poston, and the War Relocation Authority,
which had taken over Poston, had no intention
of implementing plans for a permanent
settlement.
Worse, Noguchi, was viewed with hostility by
many of those whom he had romantically
imagined were "his people."
Not only was Noguchi an outsider—at 37 he
was old for a Nisei, and because he was
biracial, an artist, a political activist, and
connected to the camp administration, he was
regarded with great suspicion by others.
Poston War Relocation Center

Within weeks of his
arrival, Noguchi asked his
friends to get him out of
camp. He left camp late in
1942, having stayed only
seven months, and swiftly
returned to the East
Coast, where he
remained for the rest of
the war. He resumed
making sculptures and
designed sets and
costumes, wrote articles,
made speeches, and
joined a new antifascist
group, the Japanese
American Committee for
Democracy. However, his
leadership role in
community affairs had
dissolved, and he never
again felt so close to the
Nisei.

Following the War, Noguchi spent a great deal of time in Japan exploring
the wrenching issues raised during the previous years. His ideas and
feelings are reflected in his works of that period, particularly the
delicate slab sculptures included in the 1946 exhibition “Fourteen
Americans,” at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Isamu Noguchi
Metamorphosis
1946
Pencil on cut out, pasted, graph paper
Isamu Noguchi
Work Sheet for Sculpture
1946
Pencil on cut out, pasted, graph paper

Describe to a friend how you relate to rocks and stones?
Jojo: Rocks have no purpose.
Ruhith: “You live under a rock” to not know what’s goin’
on. Literally, physically rocks are almost everlasting.
Len: A symbol of endurance…the ocean can not make
the rock move…
Brian: Rocks are dense, people can be dense.
MicheLLe: someone can be your “Rock”
Myar: Abrahamic religions “humans are made of the
earth” and we return to this when we pass away.
Kenny: we shape rocks, mold them, make roads, statues,

In some ways, a stone is
already a piece of sculpture,
even more so when smoothed
and shaped by such a
consummate craftsman as the
ocean. One could argue that
nothing more need be done
but admire nature's
handiwork. Yet Mr. Noguchi is
not one to leave a stone
unturned. ''Clawing'' or
scraping its surface at points,
he produces textural shifts
from matte to nubbly, and
color changes from slaty black
to warm buff to pale pebble
gray, as in ''Shiva Rock,'' a
small basalt megalith
“Shiva Rock”
Basalt
1981

Cutting, coring, boring and channeling, he penetrates the stone's
interior by means of mysterious holes -as in the granite ''Worm
Stone'' - or lays it open like a cut fruit. In the basalt ''Wounded
Rock,'' he lets a big stone sit in majestic cracks, exuding a tension
most unstone-like in its implications of mortality. And sometimes,
to show the artist's mastery over nature, he imposes on the free,
biomorphic form of a stone a contrasting construction of metal
planes.
Worm Stone
Granite
1982

Describe to THE CLASS how you relate to rocks and
stones?
Ray: Rupert park is next to my house….we used to have
“wars” in the dirt. Sticks were guns, rocks were bullets.
To make the rock bullet, you had to bring the rock to the
rock SMITH and I was the rock smith for the right side of
the park. Leaves were money, and we would charge two
leaves per rock. Some rocks break easier than
others…We would use rocks to break rocks…like boulders
to break smaller rocks, we’d smash them against the
concrete, and some rocks would blast back at you. My
cousin, Kyle got hit with some of this blast and he
couldn’t be a rock smith anymore. But I still got to be a
rock smith.
Jakara: People are made of layers, just like rocks. Each
year you gain different characteristics, and as rocks
weather and wither away they change.

The POTENTIAL of all rocks and stones
Black Slide Mantra
1988
Odori Park, Sapporo,
Japan

Playscapes
Black Slide Mantra
1988
Japan

Black Slide Mantra
1988
Japan
Playscapes

Slide Mantra
1986
Bayfront Park,
Miami, Florida
Playscapes
Slide Mantra is a massive 29-ton
sculpture carved from Carrara
marble by the late Japanese-
American artist Isamu Noguchi.
This lyrical and playful work is
more than ten-feet tall and
functions as a slide with steps
winding up the back which
descend into a spiral. Noguchi
designed Bayfront Park in 1986

Model for Slide
Mantra
1966-1985
Botticino Marble
Noguchi Museum
NYC
Playscapes

Model for Slide Mantra
1966-1985
Carrara Marble
Noguchi Museum NYC
Playscapes

Design for Play Mountain
1933
Playscapes

1933
Playscapes
Noguchi designed his
first landscape for
children in 1933.
Play Mountain
includes steps, a
curving ramp, a pool,
and a rock, all
elements that would
recur as he designed
and redesigned
playgrounds and
courtyards over the
next 50 years.

1933
Playscapes
As art critic Thomas
Hess wrote of one of
Noguchi’s unbuilt
projects, this
“playground, instead
of telling the child
what to do (swing
here, climb there),
becomes a place for
endless exploration.”

Kodomo No Kuni
1965
Outside Tokyo, Japan
Playscapes

Piedmont Park
Playscapes
1976
Atlanta GA
Playscapes

Piedmont Park
Playscapes
1976
Atlanta GA
Playscapes
“We’re in a day and age
where people walk around
with their heads in their
devices,
Public artworks like this
cause people to look up,
and heighten their
awareness and ability to
connect with their
neighbors.”
-Margo Milligan, an Atlanta resident

Playscapes “Noguchi tried in every single
decade to get a playground built
in New York,” says Dakin Hart,
senior curator at the Noguchi
Museum. “In each case, the
concept became more
sophisticated, there was more
public support and more private
support. He put a whole program
in place to give him the best
possible chance and each time he
was ultimately foiled by the
complexities of the political
situation.”

“When an artist stops being a child, he
stops being an artist.”
-Isamu Noguchi

Cai Guo Qiang, Kara Walker, FAILE,
Banksy, OBEY, Olek, Mr. Brainwash,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Camille
Henrot, and MORE!
What would a playground
designed by another artist
look like?
Choose an artist
Describe what their
playground would look like!
Jean: Kara Walker’s playground would be
a GIANT CIRCLE one painted white and
one painted black…and the white side
would be filled with high end play
equipment….
Tae: If Henry Bacon were to create a
playground it would be filled with smooth
stonework, columns….but also lots of
DETAILED…slides…angels…ARCHES! Like a
DOME SLIDE.
Kenny: Ron English’ playground would
have tons of designs and graffiti and stuff.
Brianna: Feng Mengbo’s park would be
like a living video game…swings with clear
sky backgrounds
Everyone: Space invader park would be
cool!!
KAI: Brainwash! It would be a copy of
someone else’ playground.
.

Cai Guo Qiang, Kara Walker, FAILE,
Banksy, OBEY, Olek, Mr. Brainwash,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Camille
Henrot, and MORE!
What would a playground
designed by another artist
look like?
Choose an artist
Describe what their
playground would look like!
Raph: Mr. Brainwash would be the best
artist to make a playground because of
his sense of color.
Nawal: Kara walker would have a lot of
shadowy colors in it…maybe her style
…? Artists are trying to break down
barriers that get in the way of their
message.
This could be mentally scarring
for kids that “get it”
Jakara: Maybe an “adult” playground?
Maybe the park could have a really
serious element relating to art history
but still have a childish element.
Justin: Banksy could pull this off and get
really creative with it.
Zenzi & Ray: Agreed on Banksy! Also
Faile, since they use a lot of colors and
it would be great for kids.

Cultural Appropriation
• Joie: Recently I was thinking about this….and there’s a difference
between cultural DIFFUSION and APPROPRIATION. (Calling things into
question)
• Myar: Of course it’s a bad thing! If you take something from another
culture and use it like it’s yours….
• Rasha: The Kardashians are problematic….certain fashion magazines
praise them for styling their hair in a certain way…However when
African-Americans wear their hair that way, it’s not as “cute.”
Fuller House appropriating Desi culture…
• Brianna: If you try to protect your culture it comes off like you’re
attacking a person…but if it’s important to you then it doesn’t matter if
it’s “trending” or not. At the same time, we all like to explore different
cultures. We may say “oh that’s cute.” but it needs to go beyond that.
• Taeron: Appropriation may not be a bad thing if you credit it or
justify it with a good reason.
– Rasha: There’s a difference between appropriating and appreciating it.
– Brianna: It can’t be mocking…it needs to include people of that culture.

Cultural Appropriation
• Ayy: It’s when you EXPLOIT another culture.
• Zenzi: When someone takes something and uses it as
their own.
• Artie: Take something from a culture that isn’t really
yours and you use it without honoring it.
• Jakara: Identifying with something from another
culture when it’s …..
A social condition which entails the adoption of use of
elements of one culture by members of a different
culture (and is often regarded as a negative
phenomenon.)

Cultural appropriation is the
adoption or use of elements
of one culture by members
of a different culture.
Raph: It’s a question of honoring the culture….

Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one
culture by members of a different culture.
Writing and Sharing
Observational Prompt: Describe an instance where you saw
someone else’ culture being appropriated and your reaction to it.
Self-Reflective Prompt: Describe a time when you culturally
appropriated something. Discuss your intentions and how you
made this decision.
Critical Prompt: Describe an instance when you saw your culture
being appropriated by someone outside of it.

• "Stone is the primary medium, and nature is
where it is, and nature is where we have to go
to experience life,"
-Isamu Noguchi

Noguchi part 1

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Noguchi part 1

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