A more eternal Noguchi

NEW YORK —  “A museum is, I suppose, a repository against time,” Isamu Noguchi mused in an essay as he prepared to open a permanent showcase of his work in 1985. “Fragile objects need protection, but even without this need there is a semblance of eternity, a sense of permanence that is implied by a museum, and a removal from time’s passage.”

In more personal terms, the Japanese American artist wrote that his own museum was also an “attempt to define my role as a crossing where inward and outward meet, East and West.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1904, Noguchi was the son of American writer Leonie Gilmour and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, who abandoned them and returned to Japan. Isamu became an influential sculptor and designer who merged European-American Modernism with Japanese tradition. He was also a model of cross-disciplinary collaboration who maintained studios in the United States and Japan, but he never felt completely at home in either country.

He died in 1988, but the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum lived on. An oasis in an industrial zone of Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the museum was a destination for art pilgrims and an essential study center for scholars. But it could not be open year-round. There was no heat, no air-conditioning, no elevator and no usable space in the basement. When the river rose, water backed up under the building.

All that has changed. On June 12, the museum, now called the Noguchi Museum, will unveil a 2 1/2-year, $13.5-million renovation. The money -- $3 million from the city of New York, the rest from the Noguchi Foundation and other private sources -- has financed repairs to the 27,000-square-foot building and added creature comforts, handicap access, subterranean storage and facilities for public education.

The museum -- which maintains Noguchi’s archives and a 2,383-piece collection of his work -- also has a new exhibition program to complement displays from the collection.

The inaugural show, “Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design,” presents more than 100 pieces selected to reveal the artist’s accomplishments as a multifaceted creator of furniture, stage sets, playgrounds, public spaces and sculpture in stone, wood, metal and clay.

Organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, with the Noguchi Foundation, the show was designed and installed by artist and avant-garde theater and opera director Robert Wilson.

“It’s the perfect show to launch the new program of temporary exhibitions,” says museum director Jenny Dixon. “Noguchi wasn’t just one artist. He had a specific, classic modernist sensibility, but he was cross-disciplinary, pluralistic and he collaborated with artists in other fields. He represents a very interesting time in art history, not just in our country but in our globe.”

A familiar look

At first glance, the museum does not appear to have changed much. A giant Costco looms over the neighborhood now, but Noguchi’s tranquil hideaway is still housed in a plain, two-story brick building, constructed in the 1920s as a photo-engraving plant, and the serene sculpture garden is still shaded by an umbrella-like katsura tree. As in the past, visitors are greeted by stone sculptures in the garden and the open-air gallery where light streams through horizontal slots in concrete block walls. More conventional galleries on the first floor display other examples of Noguchi’s work. The inaugural exhibition is installed upstairs.

“It cost a lot to stabilize the building, take care of the infrastructure and do other things that don’t show,” Dixon says, pointing out where the money went.

From a purist’s point of view, the familiar look is all to the good. But the museum is about to start a new, more public life.

Noguchi -- a soft-spoken, reserved, sharply focused artist -- staked out his spot in this gritty, industrial area in 1961, when he began living and working in a bare-bones building across the street from the structure that he would transform into his museum. As he prospered, he established other studios but kept the Long Island City property and added to it. In 1974 he bought the building and yard that house most of the museum and all of the sculpture garden. Then he purchased the adjacent corner lot, where a gas station once stood, and constructed the open-air gallery.

Noguchi initially used the museum building as a storage facility for his work. As time passed, he began arranging sculptures, drawings and models in the space. That led to the notion of a museum, funded by the foundation he established in 1971 and sales of licensed products, such as paper lamps, known as Akari Light Sculptures.

As his idea took shape, he designed the garden as an intimate setting for viewing sculpture. The open-air gallery was intended to display large works of basalt and granite that evolved from a process that he described as a dialogue with nature. In other areas he focused on sculpture-as-space in gardens and other environments, commissions for public monuments, designs for functional objects and collaborative ventures.

During his final years, Noguchi and his colleagues worked in offices on the second floor of the museum. Public hours were limited, but occasionally he would forget that it was open and wander into the galleries. It’s hard to say who was more shocked, Noguchi or visitors who came face to face with the famous artist.

“I think he was surprised by what he created here,” says Bonnie Rychlak, a sculptor who began working for Noguchi in 1980 and is now the museum’s curator.

Beginning June 12, the museum will be open Wednesdays through Sundays, year-round. It will offer educational and public programs that encourage investigation of Noguchi’s work from different points of view. Ten months of the year, September through June, indoor galleries will be used for temporary, thematic exhibitions related to Noguchi’s work; during the summer, a selection of about 250 works from the foundation’s collection will be on view.

The museum also has begun to organize traveling shows to illuminate aspects of Noguchi’s work.

One exhibition, featuring photographs taken by the artist in the early 1950s while traveling widely on a grant from the Bollingen Foundation, will open June 8 in Hiroshima, then travel to other cities in Japan.

The goal of all the programs, Dixon says, is to create a larger context and audience for Noguchi’s work while keeping his spirit alive.

The former executive director of the Bronx Museum of Arts, she also sees the Noguchi Museum as part of a cultural constellation. Queens, the New York borough that encompasses Long Island City, is also home to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Museum for African Art, the Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park and MoMA QNS, an outpost of the Museum of Modern Art that has been its primary exhibition space while the museum has undergone a major expansion and renovation.

With a $24-million endowment and a $2.8-million annual operating budget, the Noguchi Museum has a staff of 17 full-time employees, most of them artists. Dixon, an artist before becoming an arts administrator, says she was drawn to the Noguchi Museum partly because it was formed by “an artist’s vision, not an art historian’s vision.”

That vision permeates the culture at the museum, she says. And Noguchi’s presence still looms large, particularly for trustees and staff members who knew him.

But the museum must move on.

There’s no point in asking what Noguchi would want every time a question arises, Rychlak says. The answers arrive intuitively. What’s more, he was famous for changing his mind and trying new approaches.

“Eventually none of us who had a connection to Noguchi will be here,” she says. “What we can do is establish a real grounding for the museum, so that it continues beyond us.”