‘Akari: Sculpture by Other Means’ at The Noguchi Museum, New York
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The Noguchi Museum, New York City, presents Isamu Noguchi’s iconic Akari light sculptures, on view through January 27, 2019.Japanese American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi remained deeply engaged with his lightweight, collapsible paper lanter‘Akari: Sculpture by Other Means’ at The Noguchi Museum, New York
The Noguchi Museum, New York City, presents Isamu Noguchi’s iconic Akari light sculptures, on view through January 27, 2019.Japanese American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi remained deeply engaged with his lightweight, collapsible paper lanterns from 1951 until the end of his life. “Akari: Sculpture by Other Means” at the Noguchi Museum features some 60 lamps, representing about forty individual models, as well as a substantial selection of archival materials. The exhibition brings to light “Noguchi’s almost limitless ambitions for these luminous paper lanterns, which expand the boundaries and definitions of sculpture,” writes the museum.Noguchi Museum Acting Director Jennifer Lorch says, “Noguchi’s Akari are among his most iconic and celebrated works, and they are still in production today. This exhibition will explore them through historic and innovative installations, complemented by a trove of archival materials that document the exhibition and promotion of the lanterns from the early 1950s on.”Exhibition curator Dakin Hart, Senior Curator at the Museum, states, “‘Sculpture by Other Means’ aims to show Akari as Noguchi intended it: as a flexible, open-ended, modular ecosystem of light sculptures, rather than a fixed product line, and to demonstrate some of the unusual ways in which they shape, transform, and create space.”“Sculpture by Other Means” occupies the Museum’s second-floor galleries, with three distinct areas exploring the versatility, impact, and flexibility of Akari. One area features a floor-to-ceiling Akari “cloud” made of nearly 40 of Noguchi’s ceiling lamps. Another area features three Akari “rooms,” which exemplify Noguchi’s concept of light as both place and object. The third installation focuses on Akari’s modularity. “Noguchi intended Akari to be a flexible system of parts,” writes the museum. “The modularity that Noguchi designed into Akari (the freedom, for example, to change the height of a shade in relation to the position of the bulb with a range of extension rods), on top of the subtle but perceptible handmade imperfectness of every shade, is what has made it so much more durable and immune to fashion than a fixed product line,” adds the museum.The exhibition also includes a rich selection of archival material such as vintage photographs, advertisements, and Akari brochures, all suggesting that Noguchi’s thinking about the presentation of Akari was a continually shifting enterprise.The exhibition is on view through January 27, 2019 at The Noguchi Museum, 32-37 Vernon Boulevard Long Island City, NY 11106For more details, visit: https://www.noguchi.org/Click on the slideshow for a sneak peek at the exhibition. http://www.blouinartinfo.com/ Founder: Louise Blouin Read more