"It stands a hair shy of five feet tall and is a bit over one-and-a-half feet wide. Made of nine interlocking pieces of gray ribbon slate, it feels as though a small push would completely wreck it. Humpty Dumpty stands on three legs, but it looks two-dimensional. It has an ovoid shape, and it juts upwards like a flat rocket ship."
"He traveled the world and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Award. Then, in December 1941, he discovered that he was "the enemy." After Pearl Harbor was attacked, the federal government rounded up approximately 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent and put them into camps in the western United States. Noguchi lived on the East Coast, but he chose to volunteer to enter the desert camp of Poston in Arizona."
Art can convert internal pain into tangible forms that facilitate psychological processing and healing. Isamu Noguchi's sculpture Humpty Dumpty presents fragility and fragmentation through its delicate interlocking slate pieces, evoking breakage and vulnerability. Noguchi, born to a white American mother and a Japanese father, achieved wide acclaim before World War II, receiving a Guggenheim Award. After Pearl Harbor, U.S. authorities interned Japanese Americans; Noguchi voluntarily entered the Poston camp in Arizona. Postwar creative work helped Noguchi manage trauma and illustrates how making meaningful objects from perceived nothingness can empower survivors and liberate the psyche.
Read at Psychology Today
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