Arts
fromThe New Yorker
2 days agoA Reading List from the Director of the Noguchi Museum
Amy Hau reflects on the influence of artists' biographies, particularly focusing on resilience and community in the lives of Isamu Noguchi and Ruth Asawa.
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.
When the legendary sculptor Isamu Noguchi was tapped to redesign a blighted public park in Miami, he conceived of the project as a village green-a place where the community would gather with purpose, rather than just a manicured lawn. Originally built in 1925 after three years of construction, the park had fallen into complete disrepair by the time Noguchi was approached.