The annual Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes individuals from around the world whose work reflects the ingenuity, creativity, and social consciousness that Isamu Noguchi embodied as a pioneering artist of the 20th century. Marking its tenth year, the 2023 edition is honoring artist and writer Edmund de Waal, artist Theaster Gates, and novelist Hanya Yanagihara. Here, they share how Noguchi’s life and work has personally inspired them. From the courage that Noguchi demonstrated in America during World War II, which Yanagihara highlights, to his instinctive bond with natural materials that led de Waal to seek out Noguchi’s footsteps in Japan, and his knack for shaping public space into sites of communal play that influenced Gates early in his career.
Hanya Yanagihara
Isamu Noguchi's work has long served as an inspiration for me, both as an artist and an American. I have always admired the way he merged his dedication to craftsmanship with a sense of cultural and personal responsibility.
Although Japanese American himself, Noguchi was exempted from Executive Order 9066, a February 1942 directive that forcibly imprisoned over 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were American citizens. Yet later that year, Noguchi voluntarily committed himself to one of these camps, Poston, motivated by a desire to create a more humane environment there.
It was an astonishing act of sacrifice and compassion, one that would be greeted with suspicion, both from the federal government and from the inmates themselves. But Noguchi believed that design could – and should – make life better. Today, an artist is expected to express his political convictions, but Noguchi blurred those lines – between artist and citizen – decades ago. He's a reminder to all of us, but especially artists, that while art can be entertainment or an expression of form, it's also a tool: one to improve lives; one to shape opinions; one to express one's objections.
Edmund de Waal
Isamu Noguchi has played an indelible role in shaping my artistic journey ever since my first visit to Japan over four decades ago at the age of 17. I visited Hiroshima in the first days of my time there and remember standing on Noguchi’s ‘Peace Bridge’ with a survivor of the bombing who told me of why this place mattered, the city’s role as witness. I worked in the workshops of potters in Bizen and Tamba with whom he had collaborated in the 1950s on his radical ceramics. I made a pilgrimage to try and find his first studio in Kamakura where he covered the walls with clay, creating a dark cave in which he made his totems and where he hung his first paper lamps. I travelled to his studio in Mure on the island of Shikoku and stood amongst the waiting stone and unfinished sculptures.
Noguchi's bond with clay, stone, and his innate sense of place speak to me. His ceramics inhabit a deep continuity with the beginnings of pottery – the squeezing of clay in your hands, the markings of fire. This is pottery as a primal need to make something out of what is to hand. It is somatic. It is for me. I use porcelain – a refined white clay – but still connect to this essential quality of play. When I designed my first stage set for dance, I felt his understanding of how people move through space, how all sculpture needs bodies. So much of my work in the last thirty years has been a form of installation or intervention, a hiding and revealing. As I start to work with sculpture in the landscape using stone and water, I sense Noguchi nearby.
Noguchi approached craft with the utmost respect, recognizing values and approaches that offered a different connection to community, innovation, and tradition. As a potter, I continue to find profound resonance with Noguchi's artistic ethos, and as someone who collaborates across disciplines, I find his open-hearted practice an inspiration. As a child of a refugee and as an artist working with issues of migration and displacement, Noguchi’s profound identification with issues of equity and justice remains deeply heartening.
Theaster Gates
Noguchi was one of the makers who had an early impact on me, once I started to believe that my making ability might have more serious implications for my life. I remember hearing a lecture by the great Martin Puryear at the Art Institute of Chicago where he discussed his influences. Noguchi and Brancusi both came up, and after this lecture, I began looking more closely at their practices. What moved me so deeply was that Noguchi was not afraid to scale ideas and the language of his work was rooted between nature, the hand, and architecture. His plazas were especially meaningful for me as a young person interested in reshaping public space. But the scale change did not interrupt the playfulness, clarity of line or encounters with the hand. From small objects to theater design and public works, Noguchi’s work had a through line of excellent craftsmanship; values rooted in animistic philosophies that understand that the spiritual life within things should be respected and protected; and a conviction that the public deserves exceptionally made things.
One of the key methodologies that I share with Noguchi has to do with starting with the material first, versus starting with an idea or a design. In this logic, there is an understanding that our job is to be responsive to the preexisting conditions of nature when possible and to allow nature to shape the nature of the project. By starting with a stone, you recognize methodologically that nature has so much to offer the built environment. I also can imagine that through the philosophies that led to the Mingei movement and other notions of accepting natural ways of imperfection, you can arrive at a making that contends with the mechanical and overly polished – you can arrive at a work that has spirit in it.
There are so many ways that Noguchi’s life and practice deserve attention today and gives us meaning. First, there’s the importance of craft and the amplification of the hand’s ability as an ascetic choice that roots you to a place, a way of making, a generational steadiness, or even a set of social values. This root fights the over-commodification and simplification of creative ability. It allows for a balancing of that ever-slippery truth for the contemporary artist; that market appetite and the hunt for lucre can strip us of our commitment to ideals, life practices, and core values. Noguchi’s way carried with it the notion that an artist can be exceptionally creative and have a values-based practice that carries a deep desire to know oneself; to experience the world through creative labor; discover the limitless possibilities of materials; and arrive at one's creative ability through play.
Isamu Noguchi's estate is represented by White Cube (London, Hong Kong, Palm Beach and Paris).
Edmund de Waal, an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin, London and Paris), Gagosian (New York, Basel, London, Los Angeles, Geneva, Hong Kong, Paris and Rome), Richard Gray Gallery (Chicago and New York), White Cube (London, Hong Kong and Palm Beach) and Regen Projects (Los Angeles).
Theaster Gates, an artist and social innovator who lives and works in Chicago, is represented by Gagosian (New York, Basel, London, Los Angeles, Geneva, Hong Kong, Paris and Rome), Richard Gray Gallery (Chicago and New York), White Cube (London, Hong Kong and Palm Beach) and Regen Projects (Los Angeles).
Hanya Yanagihara is the author of three novels, The People in the Trees (2013), A Little Life (2015), and To Paradise (2022), and is editor in chief of The New York Times Style Magazine.
Isamu Noguchi
‘Noguchi Subscapes’
Until September 3, 2023
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York
Published on June 29, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed image: Isamu Noguchi with his Akari light sculptures in Japan, 1968. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 03619. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY / Artists Rights Society (ARS)